PREFACE vi; 
scribe and make clear these improved methods, to 
demonstrate how easily and inexpensively an asparagus 
bed may be had in every garden, and how much pleas- 
ure, health, and profit may be derived from the crop 
have been the principal inducements to writing this 
book. 
In a popular treatise on so widely distributed a 
vegetable as asparagus, the cultivation of which had 
been brought to a high state of development many 
centuries before the Christian era, there is little oppor- 
tunity for originality. All that the author has en- 
deavored in this little volume has been to collec, 
arrange, classify, and systematize all obtainable fadts, 
compare them with his own many years’ experience in 
asparagus culture, and present his inferences in a plain 
and popular manner. Free use has been made of all 
available literature, especially helpful among which 
has been the Farmers’ Bulletin No. 61 of the United 
States Department of Agriculture, by R. B. Handy ; 
also bulletins of the Missouri, New York, Ohio, New 
Jersey, North Carolina, Maryland, Massachusetts, and 
South Carolina and other experiment stations; the 
files of American Agriculturist ; Gardener's Chronicle, 
from which descriptions of several ornamental species 
by William Watson were condensed; Thome’s ‘‘ Flora 
von Deutschland;’’ ‘‘ Hintraegliche Spargelzucht,’’ 
von Franz Goeschke; ‘‘ Braunschweiger Spargelbuch,”’ 
