TWENTIETH ANNUAL MEETING. 207 



The future of market gardening in NFevv England is a 

 very broad subject, and requires a prophet rather than a prac- 

 tical grower to discuss it. I have a few suggestions for you 

 along this line, and then I will take up, and talk a few minutes 

 on, our methods of growing in the section about Boston. 



First I want to say your problems here in Connecticut are 

 very similar to those in Massachusetts, and the growers about 

 Hartford and the large cities in Connecticut, are confronted 

 with practically the same problems with which we are con- 

 fronted in the Boston trucking section, one problem being 

 southern competition, which we feel very severely about 

 Boston. The time was when early beans and early peas, early 

 bunch beets and bunch carrots first came on the markets, they 

 brought large prices, people were anxious, they were hungry 

 for them. Xow they can buy them months before ours come 

 on the markets, that come up from the South, from the 

 Norfolk section and further south, and they lose that appetite, 

 that spring appetite, for the first few radishes, beans, cu- 

 cumbers and peas, and consequently will not pay those prices 

 that we used to receive for certain vegetables during the first 

 few weeks that we were able to secure them. So it has ma- 

 terially reduced the price of our outdoor-grown vegetables ; 

 but the greenhouse man is perhaps the one who feels this 

 competition most keenly. 



Lettuce is one of the greatest crops grown in the South. 

 This is shipped to the northern markets, not a great deal into 

 New England, but we feel it nevertheless. A few years ago 

 before this competition was as burdensome as at present. New 

 York was the large market for New England-grown hot- 

 house lettuce. The South, by their crops of heavy head 

 lettuce, have practically taken that trade away from us, and 

 left nothing but our local markets for us to supply. This has 

 so supplied the market that the price has been very low on 

 this account, as we have been building greenhouses every year 

 in large numbers to supply the New York trade, as well as the 

 home trade, and to have it wiped out almost at once left us 

 with too manv sfreenhouses for our local demand, and the 



