94 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ILLINOIS 



being disposed to take advantage of the knowledge, we make use of the 

 hot-bed, that we may, by artificial means in advance of the season, create 

 the requisite warmth of soil to germinate the seeds and, at the same 

 time, maintain for a long while the proper temperature to hasten the 

 growth of plants, and protect them from the freezing blasts without. In 

 making hot-beds I long since discarded the old stereotyped method of 

 the books, making them entirely upon the surface of the ground ; as, 

 when digging into the ground, I often lost my heat by water filling below 

 the surface. I now set strong stakes into the ground and make a tight 

 board frame, one foot and a half high on the front side and two feet high 

 behind, to give sufficient slope to the sash to let the rains pass off; across 

 these I place my rafters and fit my sash. After having filled the frame 

 with good hot manure by sections, packing it well with a fork to within 

 two inches of the top of the front side, upon this I place six inches of 

 good, rich, mellow dirt, which will settle as thrown on till about even 

 with the top of the front. ' I sow my seeds immediately, and, by the time 

 the plants are up, the excessive heat will have passed off. This amount 

 of heat will be right for tomatoes, peppers and egg plants. For cabbage, 

 cauliflower, lettuce and celery, half this amount of heat will suffice. The 

 former should be transplanted into beds of lighter heat, and gradually 

 hardened to fit them for the open ground, while the latter should be 

 transplanted into a cold frame for the same purpose. The next thing to 

 be considered is the soil. All vegetables for the table like loose, light 

 soil ; the amount of manure required depends upon the character of the 

 soil, sandy soils requiring much more than our rich prairie soil. We 

 must also remember that some varieties of vegetables require richer soil 

 than others. These I must designate as I come to them. Let me here 

 remark, very much of success in getting a good growth depends upon 

 early and frequent stirring of the surface while the plants are young. 



I now come to open ground planting. In treating of this I shall 

 include what, when, and how to plant and cultivate, taking them alpha- 

 betically, beginning with 



Asparagus. — Up to within a few years, no one thought of making 

 an asparagus bed without first trenching the ground four or five feet deep, 

 and filling in great quantities of bones, dead animals and manure, replac- 

 ing the dirt, and setting the plants with stereotyped exactness. In set- 

 ting my asparagus beds I back-furrowed the ground to a good depth with 

 the plow, leaving it highest in the centre, with deep dead-furrows at each 

 side to insure a rapid passage of surface water from the beds, planted in 

 rows three feet apart, setting the plants one foot apart in the rows, with 

 their crowns about three inches below the surface — depending upon top 

 dressing for fertilizing. I believe most of the planting is now done in 

 that way. Until the appearance of Connover's Colossal, a few years 

 since, it was generally believed there was but one variety of asparagus. 

 Although we sometimes heard of White-top, and Purple-top, the differ- 

 ence was attributed to difference in soils. My observations lead me to 

 the conclusion that the temperature makes the difference in color — that 

 growing early, when the ground and atm()s])here are cold being ]nirple ; 



