356 CROP GROWING AND CROP FEEDING 



Wherever the frames are built closely and protected by banking, and are 

 covered in cold weather by mats or shutters, violets can be grown and bloomed 

 as freely as in greenhouses. In fact, from Virginia southward the violets 

 are better off in the frames than in any greenhouse. 



Our lady amateurs often go to a great deal of trouble in rooting slips 

 of their favorite geraniums. If they would take a simple frame and a sash in 

 the early fall and place in it a bed of clean sand, and insert all the cuttings 

 they want in this, give one good soaking and then put on a shaded sash slight- 

 ly tilted at the back, they need not give the geraniums any further attention 

 till rooted, as they will be in three or four weeks, when they can be transferred 

 to small pots. 



We have thus, in detail, tried to show the capabilities of a simple frame 

 and hotbed sash, so that the Southern reader especially can realize the possi- 

 bilities of intensive horticulture with very simple appliances. The conditions 

 are constant care and attention, and a liberal expenditure for manures and 

 fertilizers, for intensive gardening means a soil of exuberant fertility, such as 

 we seldom see in the open garden ; but we have by no means exhausted the re- 

 sources of the cold frame and sash. 



ASPARAGUS IN COLD FRAMES. 



There is, as we have seen before, no crop grown by the market gardener 

 which has been so steadily and uniformly profitable, North and South, as the 

 asparagus crop when properly grown and handled, in soil made as fertile 

 as possible. Some gardeners have made the forcing of asparagus in hotbeds 

 and houses a profitable matter, but this involves the loss of the forced roots, 

 while in cold frame culture the bed maintains its productiveness for years. 

 It will not, however, be advisable to plant a bed for immediate use of the 

 sashes. In preparation for frames the beds should be planted so that they will 

 be included in a six-foot frame. The soil should be trenched to a depth of 

 twenty inches and filled with old, rotted manure, and a good addition should 

 be made as a top dressing after the roots are set. Set the roots 12x12 inches 

 apart and more shallowly than in the general open ground culture. Keep 

 the beds perfectly clean and in the fall add a dressing of kainit at rate of one- 

 fourth of a pound to each 18 square feet, the size of a sash. In the spring 

 give an equally heavy dressing of cotton seed meal (or tankage), and again 

 keep the beds well worked. The following fall build the frames. Then, 

 during the winter, when an early crop of lettuce has been sold from other 

 frames, run the sashes on the asparagus frames and keep the glass close till 

 the soil is well warmed. Then, as the shoots begin to appear, give air as 



