30 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY, [1895. 



crop, and if a few bags of fertilizer will push the crop a few days 

 earlier and make it of better quality, it pays well. 



DISCUSSION. 



Mr. S. H. Record. Mr. President., — I notice the essayist spoke of 

 lettuce and the possibility of growing it so that it would be cheaper 

 in the market than it has been. I would somewhat question that pos- 

 sibility after some seventeen or eighteen years' experience in growing 

 it, from the fact that it costs some five or ten times as much to grow 

 it under glass as to raise it under open culture ; but we may have 

 to sell it cheaper. When we do, we will diminish our greenhouses 

 and diminish the crop growing ; that has been practically the case 

 this year. We have been adding greenhouse to greenhouse until this 

 past year. While it was said by some of the market gardeners when 

 they went to Arlington, they could hardly find a man at leisure to 

 talk with them because they were so busy building so many green- 

 houses. This year they have hardly raised any lettuce. Ten years 

 ago I made up my mind that the South would very soon knock us out 

 on lettuce growing. During the last few years, however, we have not 

 had much competition from the South. Down there they have grown 

 it chiefly in Florida. Last winter when I was in Philadelphia, and 

 also the winter before, there was a great amount of very fine lettuce 

 shipped from Florida, and it was shipped in such quantities as to knock 

 the price down so that it was hardly worth while to grow it under 

 glass ; and that has been discouraging some of our northern green- 

 house growers. Mr. Budlong, who is one of the largest gardeners in 

 New England, has five or six greenhouses, and two or three hot- 

 beds besides, containing lettuce. He went to Florida about a year 

 ago, and he said he came back as sick a man as he ever saw ; and I 

 felt just so myself when I went into market in Philadelphia, 

 when I was there last winter. He said he was not goiug to build any 

 more greenhouses. But you know near the very last of December we 

 had a frost that destroyed all the oranges and lettuce in Florida. 

 Now we began to ship to Philadelphia, and our first lettuce met the 

 Florida lettuce there. One man had various vegetables valued at 

 $45,000. He had $42,000 offered him on Friday for what he had in his 

 garden ; on Saturday he said he would have taken forty-five cents for 

 the whole of it. Now we have letters from Philadelphia wanting us to 

 send all the lettuce we can every week ; they say even if it comes 

 there Saturday, the day they generally don't like to have it come, 

 they want it. Many of our greenhouses here have not nearly the 



