152 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



VEGETABLES FOR MARKET GARDENS. 



Prof. Mapes. — It is difficult to give any general rule. Land in tKig 

 vicinity filled with pulverized shells, as at Communipaw, will grow cabbage 

 year after year. I cannot do that. I cannot grow cabbage after rutaba- 

 gas. None of the brassica tribe will grow after using hog-pen manure, 

 or other highly nitrogenous manure. On Long Island, cabbage is often 

 set in the potato field to grow as the tops die down. With the cabbage, 

 lettuce is sown. I have raised 12,000 cabbages per acre. As to the most 

 profitable crop near New York, I can only say we can't aiford to raise 

 grain. I have raised over 100 bushels of corn to the acre, but I can*t 

 afford it, because I can raise 1,200 bushels of beets per acre, and 1,500 

 bushels of parsnips. I recommend beets grown in large quantity, because 

 the market will bear a great many, and is seldom overstocked. The kind 

 most generally grown is the long red beet, which is inferior to almost any 

 other. It is woody. The turnip blood-beet is much better. The Bassano 

 beet is the best for the table, but not as salable as the long red in our 

 market. I can only raise parsnips profitably on drained land, where they 

 grow with very little manuring. I dig them by running a lifting subsoil 

 plow along the row, 18 inches deep, which loosens the roots so they can be 

 pulled out by hand. 



Tomatoes, I find, grow much better by cutting away the entire top, with 

 the little fruit, the lower ones ripening ten days earlier, and are much be.t- 

 ter fruit, and being earlier sell higher. 



Lima beans must be treated in the same way, by pinching off the buds 

 when five and a half feet high. No manure suits this crop so well as 

 Peruvian guano. To get them early plant them in sods two inches square, 

 with the small end down, and place them in the cellar, and moisten to 

 vegetate, and plant four sods around a pole. 



Carrots will average 37^ cents a bushel in New York, and are always 

 saleable and are easily grown. Mix the seed with one-tenth its weight of 

 radish seed, which grows before the carrots and marks the rows, so that 

 they can be cultivated by a horse or mule, to keep the weeds down and 

 save hand weeding. It is good for the carrot crop to pull out the radishes 

 for market purposes, or crush them with a roller as they stand. A mule 

 can be trained to walk between narrow rows. A subsoil lifter is a good 

 thing to run between the rows when the plants are small. A large lifter 

 run by the side of the row will loosen the roots for harvest. 



Melons require a peculiar trimming. Pinch off the first runner bud 

 when the third rough leaf appears, and so on with the branches. This will 

 make short vines in a round hill. There is nothing like deep tilth for mel- 

 ons- It is a good plan to bore a hole with a post auger three or four feet 

 deep under each hill. I would pinch back the whole tribe of plants of this 

 kind, melons, cucumbers, squashes, all in the same way. 



Potatoes I cannot grow without rotting upon ordinarily plowed land. 

 On underdrained and subsoiled land my potatoes never rot. 



