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THE GARDENERS' MONTHLY 



[September, 



The farm-gardener has an interesting pursuit in 

 his culture of vegetables, one offering a rare oppor- 

 tunity to the observing mind ; the ever-changing 

 influences of heat and cold, wet and drought, 

 fertility and barrenness, producing effects which 

 some time seized upon by the intelligent grower 

 puts him for a time a wav ahead of his competitors. 

 Gardening is an art worthy of the pursuit of the most 

 intelligent mind; it is a scientific study every day; 

 its scope has been enlarged during the past thirty 

 years by the discoveries \n vegetable nutrition, the 

 chemical constituents of plants, soils and fertilizers, 

 vegetable physiology and botanical affiliations ; 

 these all make high farming a science, and one of 

 the most delightful. The hand of man directed 

 by practical and scientific experience laying, as it 

 were, at the feet of nature such materials as nature 

 can take hold of and shape in her own forms. The 

 farm is a laboratory where man is an active agent. 



The successful market-gardener must unite the 

 qualifications of the trucker, farmer, merchant and 

 philosopher, for he must investigate the laws of 

 vegetation as well as the laws of sale. Advanced 

 market-gardening, thus it will be seen, is a techni- 

 cal pursuit and one requiring considerable means 

 and a consideration of costs may not be out of 

 place. The capital required in market-gardening 

 far exceeds ordinary farming. The suburban 

 market-gardens about Philadelphia are only 

 worked at double the expense of others more 

 remote — quite five hundred dollars per acre being 

 the capital necessary to stock and conduct them. 



This extraordinary expense is somewhat balanced 

 by the frequency with which such gardeners can 

 send their vegetables to market, and the fresh con- 

 dition in which they are delivered ; whereas the 

 distant country gardener has to consign his pro- 

 duce to commission men, taking such prices as the 

 market affords under forced sales. 



High as may seem the estimate of $500 per 

 acre as necessary capital, it is nothing compared 

 with the expenses of some market-gardeners near 

 London and Paris. Land on the outskirts of those 

 cities rents for $200 and $300 per acre, often twice 

 that much. In the suburbs of Paris the writer 

 has visited a market-garden of three acres which 

 annually pays a rental of $1800 and yet affords a 

 large profit to its intelligent cultivator. 



From this hasty review of market-gardening one 

 readily perceives that in it is invested a deal of 

 capital guided by intelligence and technical ex- 

 perience. Success, however, hinges firstly upon 

 the purity of the seeds sovTn, and it is here the 

 seedsman enters the arena as an active participant 

 — one wielding an immense power for good or evil. 



Seedsmen may be divided into two classes — 

 merchants and seed growers. 



The grower of seeds must be, first of all, an able 

 gardener or else he will fail in the beginning, for 

 he must do all that the trucker does and then he is 

 only half way through ; he must await, after the 

 development of a vegetable fit for market, the slow 

 production of seed. He is thus twice a cultivator, 

 running twice the risks of a market gardener, wet 

 and drought, heat and cold, tornado and insect 

 injuries, insufficient or excessive fertility. The,in- 

 telligent seed grower, recognizing the superiority 



of individual plants in physical characteristics and 

 in potency of seed, the results sometimes of nature's 

 sports and at other times of ■ cross-fertilization, 

 selects them from his general crop, and breeds up 

 varieties of old species sometimes so distinct as 

 hardly to be recognized. But he must not breed 

 too high ; he must bring to the culture of his crop 

 of seed, if not scientific, at least very practical ob- 

 servations upon the subject of sterility, a condition 

 so very frequently showing itself under systems of 

 high culture, over-feeding and interbreeding — 

 these influences producing an excessive growth of 

 tissue, abortive flowers, and consequently little 

 seed. 



Many seed crops take fourteen to fifteen months 

 from the sowing until harvest; for instance, cab- 

 bages, cauliflower, beet, parsnip, carrots, salsify, 

 celery, onion, parsley and many others, all have 

 to be sown during spring months, April and May, 

 and do not produce their seed until the second 

 July or August following. All these vegetables, 

 perfect for domestic purposes, being developed the 

 autumn of the year in which they are sown, but 

 the genera being of biennial forms they have to be 

 carried over to obey nature's laws. Thus the seed 

 farmer is, we say, twice a cultivator and subject to- 

 extended injurious influences which do not attach 

 to market-gardening. 



Under these conditions the reader will perceive 

 that seed farming cannot every year be a success. 

 There is a certainty of some influences being detri- 

 mental to sOme crops, some being better developed 

 by moisture, some by moderate heat, others by 

 tropical sun. In no location can all crops be 

 grown equally well. As a farmer well knows that 

 certain parts of his farm are better suited for cer- 

 tain crops than others, so the seed grower knows 

 that different counties in different States have their 

 particular advantages. 



The seed grower, wherever he be lound, will be 

 recognized among the more advanced farmers of 

 his section. To be successful he must have made 

 many steps forward ; he must have best land, im- 

 plements and barns; he must spend money freely 

 for fertilizers and wages ; he must be a student of 

 nature and a good administrator, for his plans must 

 be laid further ahead than those of any ordinary 

 farmer, and further than most merchants. 



Within the past twenty years seed farming in the 

 United States has taken an extraordinary growth ; 

 for before that time seed farmers could almost be 

 counted on the fingers ; now specialists in the 

 seed production are found everywhere in the East 

 and West. 



Discriminating planters demand Am.erican 

 grown seeds ; they have been too often deceived 

 in the trash shipped from Europe. They know 

 from experience that European seeds cannot be 

 relied upon to be as good in quality or vitality as 

 American ; they know that they are ripened in a 

 climate of much moisture, and consequently do 

 not possess such powers of germination as ours, and 

 they know that the American seed grower as a 

 man is, in intelligence, observation aiul tact so far 

 ahead of the peasant culti\'ators of Europe, as to 

 leave no room for companson as to llie results of. 

 his labors. 



