No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 285 



jjerated idea of its linancial results and with no realization of the 

 amount of capital needed, liave been caused by the spreading of 

 their store of manure and fertilizer over broad acres, when by 

 applying them to more restricted areas they could have been suc- 

 cessful. A'S hat success has come to me in my adopted calling I as- 

 cribe to the fact that by reason of poor health my start was on a 

 small scale. This was twenty-eight years ago, and I had but one- 

 fourth of an acre in cultivation. On that I learned that the capital 

 needed for the purchase of an acre of ordinary farm land ought to 

 be duplicated and quadrupled for the land's final successful prepa- 

 ration for a market garden, and if I have to-day something over 

 forty acres in cultivation, the increase has come only by slow annual 

 growth and gradual addition to my domain. My advice to all be- 

 ginners, whether already owning farms or whether ready to invest 

 in laud purchase has been and is to start on a small scale. They 

 will then gradually' realize the requirements of plant food by the 

 various crops, and learn that fine, juicy, tender, crisp and palatable 

 vegetables can be grown only where the plant finds a never stinted 

 supply of food and is never checked in its growth by hunger or 

 by want of cultivation. Just try it on a beet to convince yourself, 

 drow a beet under the conditions I specified and grow one on a 

 poor piece of land; you will find the one tender and sweet, the other 

 tough and stringy. The more rapidly vegetables grow, the more 

 high quality they will possess and the greater will be the demand 

 for them where their quality is known. 



I have not named '^thorough cultivation" as one of the conditions 

 first given, because I believe that to be covered in the subject of 

 "soil." While on land newly devoted to market gardening the 

 owner may, because of the shallowness of the top soil, not be able 

 to plow deeper than six or seven inches, he ought in a very few 

 years, by turning up an additional half inch or inch of the sub-soil 

 per year, or even both in spring and fall, be able to set his plow 

 at ten or twelve inches. Few farmers seem to realize the differ- 

 ence in drought resistance between deeply and shallowly plowed soil. 



The plowing should be thorough and the harrowing still more so. 

 Do not think that harrowing the laud just once to make the surface 

 level is the kind of harrowing needed to prepare the soil for the 

 hairlike rootlets of the sprouting seed as well as of the growing 

 plant. Pulverize! Pulverize!! Pulverize!!! using, if possible, sev- 

 eral varieties of harrow so as to get the soil worked over and over 

 and made fine enough to go through a sieve. Clods have no place in 

 the soil economy of the garden, and where they exist a perfect 

 seed bed does not exist. 



No man can afiord to invest in quantities of fertilizing material 

 and, after applying this to his land, counteract its beneficial effect 

 by want of judgment or energy in cultivation. From the time the 



