If at any time the hills should show a sickly yellow, F od for 

 apply Nitrate at once, however late in the season. 



Cucumbers, squash and cantaloupes should be 161 

 planted in hills 5 feet apart each way, watermelons in 

 hills 10 feet apart each way. Level culture rather than 

 ridges is found to be more generally successful on very 

 light soils. 



Profitable Onion Cultivation. 



There is no crop that can be grown Adaptability of 

 so successfully on a large scale, in such t ^ 1 e s p?* on to 

 a variety of soil and climate, and that 3 s * 



will respond more profitably to intelligent cultivation 

 and fertilizing, than the onion. The American farmer 

 has usually been willing to leave the growing of this 

 savory vegetable almost entirely to the enterprising 

 immigrant, who often makes more net profit at the 

 end of the season from his five acres of onions than the 

 general farmer makes on one hundred acres. The 

 weeder and the improved wheel-hoe have made it com- 

 paratively easy to care for the crop; there is no reason 

 why the progressive farmer who is looking about for a 

 new money crop should not raise onions with ease and 

 profit. 



We shall consider here the growing of onions only 

 as a field crop for the fall and winter market. The onion 

 can be successfully grown anywhere in the United States 

 where other vegetables thrive. 



The reason that onions have not been more gener- 

 ally grown by farmers is owing to the mistaken idea that 

 it is impossible to grow them without the application of 

 vast quantities of stable manure, but onion-growing 

 with the aid of chemical fertilizers is not only much 

 cheaper, but the average crop is much larger. The ex- 

 cessive quantity of stable manure required to grow a 

 maximum crop tends to make the land too open, when 

 the great secret of onion culture is to get the land solidi- 

 fied. The ploughing under of so much bulky manure 

 also tends to cut off the moisture supply from below, 

 which is so important in the quick growth of crops of 



