LETTUCE IN WINTER. 105 



its best lettuce. Strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless 

 true. Mr. Morse's house is altogether three hundred and fifty 

 feet long, I should say, and perhaps more, — a part twenty- 

 four feet wide, and a part forty-four feet wide. It would 

 seem to be rather a poorly-built house. It is not constructed 

 nicely, and yet it answers every purpose. The object of the 

 practical market-gardeners has been not to have their houses 

 cost a great deal of money, and yet answer the purpose for 

 which they are designed. I would say that in Newton, where 

 a great deal of lettuce and many other vegetables are raised 

 under glass, the cultivation of those things has been, until 

 within a few years, almost entirely in hot-beds. This long 

 house runs east and west, or nearly so. It has in it two 

 furnaces in which coal is burned, and hot- water pipes run up 

 and down the house, the entire length. He has an economi- 

 cal way of watering ; for you will see that the growing crop 

 requires a great deal of water, especially in a hot day, 

 towards spring. You would be surprised to see the amount 

 of water required. Mr. Morse has a deep well of water (not 

 such soft water as you have in your town, and which I have 

 seen coming out here so abundantly in this fountain, and 

 which would be better for his crops), and he has a wind-mill, 

 so that there is no expense for pumping. The wind-mill is so 

 arranged as to pump the water into a tank, and it is carried 

 through a hose to any part of this building, so that the 

 expense for watering is very small indeed. The house, as I 

 said before, is devoted to lettuce, of which there are 

 two crops obtained in a season, sometimes three. He 

 endeavors to have a crop off by January. Then follows 

 another crop, which does not usually bring so high a price as 

 the first. He has been successful in conducting that experi- 

 ment, although I believe he was not so successful the first 

 year as he expected to be. It requires some little experience 

 to be successful in the management of that business. The 

 great object with such structures is to get the glass as near as 

 you can to the growing vegetables. 



I might say a word more upon this subject, in relation 

 to the growing of cucumbers under glass. We discussed that 

 question a little coming up in the cars, and one gentleman 

 wondered how it was that there was any demand for cucum- 



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