1880.1 



AND HORTICULTURIST. 



337 



footing with him as a market gardener. I con- 

 sider his success in this branch of horticulture : 

 as important as any he has practiced. But - 

 nothins? cuts John Bull so badly as to tell him the i 

 American system of doing things is ahead of 

 his, And L can safely say that nine out of every 

 ten failures by gardeners, whether florists or 

 market gardeners, is by sticking to their Old 

 Country notions, and the sooner " greenhorn " 

 gardeners lay their Old Country practices to 

 one side and adopt the cheaper and more ener- 

 getic method of doing things as practiced by , 

 successful men in this country, the sooner will ^ 

 they come to success. 



THE PLOUGH vs. THE SPADE. 



BY PETER HENDERSON. 



An " English Gardener " from Lafayette, Indi- 

 ana, in your September number, without much 

 preface, accuses me of " stating things that are 

 not facts," but I find when he goes on a little far- 

 ther that his siDecifications are not quite so se- 

 rious as his charge, as it appears that my 

 " stating things that are not facts " was not a 

 question of fact at all, but only a difference of pro- 

 fessional opinion between him and me. Inasmuch 

 as I claimed to believe that the English 

 market gardeners who still stick to the spade are 

 old fogies ; while it is most evident that he holds 

 very decidedly to the belief that they are not, or 

 he would never have been so egotistical as to 

 accuse any one of misstating facta without 

 having other grounds than that. 



At the risk of repeating myself — for I think I 

 have somewhere told the story before — I will 

 here state the incident that brought out the 

 articles that your correspondent evidently re- 

 fere to. In 1872, I made, in company with Wil- 

 liam Davidson, late of the firm of Bennett & Da- 

 vidson, Flatbush, L. I., a tour through the 

 market gardens around London ; we called one 

 day in July, in the Chelsea district, on an old 

 and long established market gardener who 

 worked some fifty acres ; the day we happened 

 to call he was in a great state of excitement, 

 his whole force of forty men had left — struck 

 for higher wages — and he dolefully said that all 

 his ground was to dig for celery crop without 

 a man left fit to handle a spade except his two 

 sons. I told him I too was a market gardener 

 of twenty years' standing, working quite as 

 much land as he did, and that I would not allow 

 my land to be dug with a spade, even if it were 



done for nothing ; for that long and extensive 

 experience had told me that in any soil the 

 plough and harrow were better pulverizers than 

 the spade, and at about one-tenth of the cost. 

 The gentleman was just in the humor to listen. 

 If he had had no labor disturbance he would have 

 probably (like the Englishman from Lafayette) 

 told me that I was " stating things that were not 

 facts," but he was more courteous, he thanked 

 me for the suggestion, said that he had heard 

 that some gardeners had used the plough in the 

 Provinces, and that he would at once try it and 

 see if he could not get more independent of 

 " them 'anged beggars who 'ad given 'im so much 

 trouble." 



He was right in what he had heard, for we 

 found that it was the rule rather than the excep- 

 tion, in districts away from London, that the 

 plough was the implement used; for the very 

 next day our tour brought us to a cultivator 

 some ten miles from London in the direction of 

 the Edgeware road, where we found a most in- 

 telligent gardener, working 150 acres in close 

 crop, who had used the plough and harrow ex- 

 clusively in tilling the soil for over twenty years, 

 and who laughed as heartily at the benighted 

 metropolitans as we did, and accounted for their 

 persistence in holding to the spade by stating 

 that the greater part of the market gardens in 

 the suburbs of London had been worked for 

 generations often by the same families, the busi- 

 ness descending from father to son, and who 

 had stuck to the same methods as they had done 

 fifty years before. 



There is certainly no more reason why the 

 plough should not be used to till nurseries or 

 market gardens in Europe than in America, for 

 any cultivator, worthy of the name, knows if the 

 soil is too wet for the plough it is also too wet 

 for the spade, and if stony ground would tram- 

 mel the plough in its work it would certainly be 

 far more troublesome for the spade. So unless 

 the " English Gardener from Indiana " can give 

 me better reasons than these for the continuance 

 ofsucli stage coach practice in these days of steam, 

 I believe I will have to retaliate and charge him 

 with " stating things that are not facts." My 

 friend also gives me two or three rambling shots 

 about something I have said sometime or other, 

 of " firming the soil " and about " splitting the 

 bark of trees," evidently intended for some 

 kind of censure, but what he wants to convey 

 or complain of I fail to make out, and so I can- 

 not oblige him with an answer. But he tells us 



