348 CROP GROWING AND CROP FEEDING 



eral plantation, and the tomato plants are trained to stakes with a single stem, 

 a practice we have abandoned in the general crop, but which is desirable here 

 for an extra early crop. Under this treatment we can get ripe fruit from 

 Maulers Earliest tomato the first of June, and have had stray specimens ripe 

 in May. 



Of course we use the sashes for the hardening off of the general early crop 

 of tomatoes to go into the open ground, but we never attempt the hardening 

 off of the egg plant. All that we have not room for in the spare frames are 

 kept under glass in the pots till the nights are warm, for a check to an egg 

 plant is ruin for the season. 



COLD FRAME CULTURE IN MORE NORTHERN SECTIONS. 



What we have written has been more especially in reference to the prac- 

 tice best adapted to the section from Virginia southward, but the use of frames 

 for the culture of the lettuce crop can easily be extended to the latitude of 

 Philadelphia on the eastern coast of the United States, and Kentucky in the 

 central section. North of Virginia it will be necessary to carry the plants 

 for the second crop in winter in extra frames, where they will simply have the 

 protection of the sashes and be kept in a hardy condition till needed. We 

 have grown frame lettuce on a large scale and with profit in the northern part 

 of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and also in a very cold locality in the ele- 

 vated country north of Baltimore city, where we had a winter climate colder 

 than that of Philadelphia. In this instance our frames were built of brick 

 and sunk below the general level, and we used tongued and grooved shutters 

 for covering the frames in cold weather. In this way we grew the winter crop 

 of lettuce and headed it with perfect success in winters when the mercury fell 

 to eighteen degrees below zero, and yet no frost got into the 

 frames to do any damage. Under such conditions, however, the 

 question may arise whether it would not be better to use heated 

 srreenhouses at once, for under these climatic conditions, and the 

 constant presence of heavy snowfall, the attention to the frames was a 

 serious matter, and the labor of constant cleaning of snow and the taking off 

 and on of the heavy shutters, which required two men to handle, made the 

 culture nearly as expensive as it would have been in houses heated by hot 

 water, where the work could at least have been more comfortably done. There- 

 fore, in sections where the winter temperature is apt to go below zero and 

 there is a heavy snowfall, it will be found better to use greenhouses for all 

 winter forcing of vegetable crops. 



