200 HOW TO GET A FARM, 



these vacant lots, and made a market garden, which is more 

 profitable than twenty times its area of wheat and corn in 

 Illinois. We were pointed to one portion of it that had 

 already yielded two crops this season, worth about $700 an 

 acre, and is now set with celery that will produce four or 

 five hundred more. True, it costs labor and manure, and 

 requires skill beyond that requisite to grow potatoes or 

 pumpkins, but it pays a large profit upon all outlays, and 

 leaves a handsome surplus to reward the man of intellect 

 who does or directs the work. 



&quot; A little further on we stopped a few minutes to look at 

 the work of two remarkably skillful English gardeners, 

 father and son, enthusiastic propagators and producers of 

 new plants and rare flowers. Among the curious things in 

 the garden are a thousand thrifty plants of the Lawton 

 blackberry, alt propagated from one plant stem last spring, 

 by some secret of their own, which enables them to multi 

 ply it almost indefinitely. But the most curious of all 

 things about this garden, where we see everything growing 

 so luxuriantly, is the fact that it is done without manure. 

 They were too poor to buy it, and they cannot afford to 

 grow weeds to make compost, and as the surface had been 

 exhausted by long cropping it in the old style of farming, 

 what were they to do? Go on the same old course of put 

 ting nothing on, and taking everything off that the thin 

 surface-soil would produce ? No, they could not live by 

 that, and as they would not buy and cart on fertility, they 

 dug for it. They found it two or three feet below the sur 

 face, where they put the loose stones, enabling the water to 

 drain off, and roots to run down. Now, when a plant needs 

 fertilizing, a loosening of the surface with a fork lets in the 

 air, and the plant grows again with renewed vigor. De 

 voted industry and spade labor produce the results we see. 

 &quot; Next we come to East New York, where waste lots lie 



