TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL MEETING. 



259 



as one hundred you get back from either blood or high grade 

 tankage from sixty-five to seventy per cent. Furthermore, the 

 plant food in nitrate of soda can be bought to-day for fifteen 

 cents a pound, and in other compounds it costs from twentv to 

 twenty-four. I was lr)ing to examine my boy one day in frac- 

 tions, and I said to him. "If you had half an apple, and I gave 

 y-ou another half, or if you had a dollar and I gave you an- 

 other, what would you have?" ''Why,'' he says, "I would 

 have a fit." Well, I didn't examine him any further. 



Now, friends, with that method of feeding market garden 

 ■crops, supplemented by additional applications of soluble ni- 

 trate in the form of nitrate of soda, you can carry any crop 

 to maturity. And not only that, there is no form in which 

 you can feed a market garden crop with so much success. 

 There is hardly a crop that we grow that we do not use that 

 method on. It is used all through our section. In my case, 

 or in anybody's who uses it, the application is so soluble that 

 it dissolves in the first twenty-four hours, and the plant is 

 ready to take it up in the next twenty- four hours. I have 

 seen it show in from the forty-eighth to the sixtieth hour 

 after it has been applied. The New Jersey Station put out a 

 "bulletin on the use of nitrate of soda, advocating its use. 

 Some eight or ten years later I ran for an experiment for quite 

 a while some fourteen or fifteen difi^erent crops, applying ni- 

 trate of soda in different ways to see what it would do, and 

 in every instance the application of nitrate of soda gave me 

 the best results, and those results were obtained at the least 

 expense. 



My friends, there is another point. The man who is try- 

 ing to grow market garden crops depends on the commercial 

 seedsmen too much for his supply of seed. Every time a man 

 does that he is very likely to get disappointed. I heard a man 

 say, not a week ago, that after reading over a catalog the less 

 he knew. They are painted in such glowing colors. It will 

 apply in every instance as well. In my own neighborhood 

 there is a tomato cannerv right near the station. You can go 



