THE GARDEN AND ORCHARD 121 



At the height of the local season tomatoes did 

 not go below five cents a pound in the Philadelphia 

 stores. 



In the immediate-use garden the thing most 

 often overlooked and neglected is the late summer 

 planting for fall use. All those vegetables that re- 

 quire cool weather lettuce, radishes, spinach, peas, 

 and so forth will flourish in the cool of fall quite 

 as well as in the cool spring. Hereabouts our first 

 frost comes in September, but the real severe freeze 

 is usually deferred until Thanksgiving or later. 

 Lettuce, Chinese cabbage, spinach, and such like 

 will keep well into the winter if protected with 

 leaves or litter. Which reminds me that a valuable 

 adjunct to the early and late raw-greens crops is 

 the water cress. 



Midway of the fields at Medlock Farm is a 

 shallow spring. In the summer of 1921 I planted 

 five cents' worth of water cress seed along it. I do 

 not think there has been a year since that we have 

 not had at least five dollars' worth of cress from 

 the bed; while the stream that flows from the 

 spring has seeded water cress on our neighbors' 

 farms from here to Norristown. And there is more 

 than the mere monetary or physiological profit in 

 that bed: there is the high aesthetic satisfaction 

 that comes of walking through the fields of a cold 

 March evening, when snow still lingers under 

 banks and fence lines but the bark of the maples 



