GROWING GARDEN CROPS FOR THE CANNING FACTORIES. 33I 



As every farmer knows, sweet corn is planted and cultivated sim- 

 ilarly to field corn, but being- delicate and tender it does not sprout 

 as quickly and vig^orously as field corn unless the soil and season be 

 warm. It is very prone to rot if the ground is cold and wet after 

 planting. But once it does get its head out of the ground, it is quite 

 as tenacious of life as its plebeian brother. In this connection, a word 

 about planting. Don't plant your sweet corn over two inches deep 

 and don't be discouraged if it doesn't come up within two weeks. 

 Be sure by careful examination that it has decayed before replanting, 

 or you may have more fodder than corn. 



Theoretically tomatoes are a much more attractive proposition 

 to the canner than corn, but practically they have proven anything 

 but profitable in this section. The average man with a small garden 

 will tell you of the loads of tomatoes which g"0 to waste on his plot, 

 and he cannot understand why the canners of this state hesitate to 

 pack them. It is one thing to get a good yield from a dozen tomato 

 vines and quite another to make an acre pay. No good heavy-bearing 

 variety has yet been discovered which will ripen its fruit early 

 enough to give long enough season to make it pay at such prices as 

 the canner can afford. This coupled with the fact that tomatoes 

 have the same season as corn, require. a different sized can and dif- 

 ferent machinery, makes the corn canner hesitates to turn from^ the 

 thing he knows he can grow to that which he is not certain of. The 

 speaker has had on his own place in Maryland thirty acres in a single 

 field, but such a thing would be impossible here. In Maryland the 

 plants are started in cold frames or open beds. Here the seed must 

 be sowed in hotbeds and transplated at least once, sometimes twice. 

 Every transplanting, while increasing the stockiness and hardiness 

 of the plant, checks its maturity. This means late ripening. 



The variety best adapted for canning is the Stone, but its great 

 drawback for this section is that it does not begin to ripen until 

 around September first. As the average date of killing frost in this 

 section is September 20th, the Stone cannot ripen one-half of its 

 fruit in that time. The task then is to find a variety which will 

 begin to ripen by August 15th. The speaker has hitherto refused 

 to attempt to pack tomatoes in this state owing to the lack of such 

 a variety. But this year he thought he had found the much-desired 

 in Spart's Early Anna. All descriptions of it were attractive, so 

 he planted at Clearwater, Minnesota, about fifteen acres of as fine 

 a lot of hotbed plants as he has ever seen. The promise of the vines 

 was splendid, and the blossoming and set of the fruit satisfactory — 

 but the result was the same old disappointment. Fruit began to 

 come into the factory on time — about the 20th of August, but at the 



