6 MARKET GARDENIKG. 



of building, appliances and labor, would require a cash 

 capital of eighty to one hundred dollar^? per acre. For 

 example, a beginner in market gardening in South Jersey, 

 on a five-acre patch, would need fiye hundred dollars to 

 set up the business and run it until his shipments began 

 to return him money. "With the purpose of securing 

 information on this interesting point, the writer asked 

 for estimates from market gardeners in different locali- 

 ties, and the result has been that from Florida the reports 

 of the necessary capital per acre in land or its rental (not 

 of labor), fertilizers, tools, implements, seed and all the 

 appliances, average ninety-five dollars, from Texas forty- 

 five, from Illinois seventy dollars ; from the Norfolk dis- 

 trict of Virginia the reports vary from seventy-five to 

 one hundred and twenty-five dollars, according to loca- 

 tion, and from Long Island, Kew York, the average of 

 estimates at the east end are seventy-five, and, at the west 

 end, one hundred and fifty dollars. 



Market gardeners, living ten miles out of Philadel- 

 phia, on tracts of twenty and thirty acres, devoting all 

 their land and energies to growing vegetables, sometimes 

 paying forty dollars per acre for rent, estimate that the 

 necessary capital averages from two hundred to three 

 hundred dollars per acre, according to the amount of 

 truck grown in hotbeds. These same men calculate the 

 profits to be from one hundred and fifty dollars to two 

 hundred and fifty dollars per acre. 



Very different is the case on the immediate outskirts 

 of Pliiladelphia, and other large cities, with the five and 

 ten acre gardeners, employing several men to the acre, 

 sometimes a larger force, where high rents, high wages, 

 intense manuring and expensive forcing-houses combine 

 to swell the expenses to an astonishing degree, often over 

 six or seven hundred dollars per acre being absorbed the 

 first year, and without which ready capital at command 

 the suburban cultivator would be driven to the wall 



