GROWING SEEDS FOR THE MARKET. 183 



among them and cover with the same. As good a way probably, 

 as any, is to plant them so late that they will not get over-ripe and 

 then put them in trenches of two feet in depth and not over eighteen 

 inches wide, covering with sufficient straw and soil to keep out 

 earlj'^ freezing and adding two feet of earth when the season for 

 very cold weather arrives. 



The Subtractions. — Onion seed are subject to attack from 

 thrips and two forms of blight of a fungous character ; one attacks 

 the stalk and the other the seed heads. The crop may be excep- 

 tionally promising up to within a week of its ripening, when either 

 of these blights — that which attacks the stalk is much the more 

 common — may nearly ruin it. 



Cauliflower seed is one of the most ditflcult and uncertain of all 

 seed to raise. The same number of plants which of one variety 

 gave me sixty pounds of seed, of two other kinds cultivated in the 

 same locality, an island near the Marblehead shore, manured and 

 fertilized in the same way, gave me but little over a great spoon- 

 ful each. In these cases it was not because the heads were small 

 or feeble, for some of them were of enormous dimensions, being 

 much larger than the largest I have ever seen exhibited at our 

 annual fairs. As the heads matured they rotted instead of sending 

 out seed shoots. 



Other subtractions from the profit of the seed grower might be 

 added, such as the loss by injury to the seed from the decaying of 

 squashes and all that class of vegetables, but what I have detailed 

 will suffice to show that the seed raiser has to learn not only the 

 subtractions which he has in common with the farmer in raising all 

 vegetables for seed stock, but other and additional losses which 

 are peculiar to his own business. 



Seed raising and saving is not all smooth sailing. The covering 

 for cabbages sometimes proves to be too heavy for a warm winter, 

 causing sprouting and rotting of the heads before it is safe to plant 

 them out ; or too light for a very cold winter, in which case they 

 are frozen through the stumps and so ruined for seed purposes. 

 If they have been frozen through the stump the fact can be 

 detected by the presence of a ring of dark color when the stump 

 is cut transversely. The head may be in good market condition, 

 and send forth sprouts, yet such will invariably rot below the head 

 as the season advances, and ultimately die. Fifteen or twenty 

 years ago the thermometer, with no snow on the ground, fell 



