EXPENSE OF HEATING AND LABOR. 9 



farmer desires employment for the winter months. Many 

 of the smaller cities even of twenty thousand and less 

 afford a ready market for a considerable quantity of lettuce, 

 tomatoes and cucumbers, making it necessary to ship only 

 a comparatively small surplus to distant markets. A 

 home and personal market is always to be preferred to a 

 distant or metropolitan one. 



Cost of heat and labor. The two important items of 

 expense in the management of a forcing structure, as al- 

 ready said, are the heating and the labor. It is impossible 

 to give any exact estimates of the necessary outlay for 

 these items, because these expenses are most intimately 

 associated with the exposure, tightness, efficiency of the 

 heating apparatus, and handiness of each particular house. 

 A single glass house, standing alone, is more expensive to 

 heat than the same house in a range or nest of houses. 

 In central New York, where the winters are long and 

 severe, a detached house, 20 x 100 ft. in ground area, 

 will generally require, for a tomato-forcing temperature, 

 from 15 to 20 tons of coal for the year, whether heated by 

 steam or hot water. For a lettuce-forcing temperature, 

 one-third less coal is usually sufficient. 



A good workman, who is acquainted with the business, 

 should be able to do all the work of growing tomatoes, 

 except the firing, in two houses 20 x 100 ft. of ground sur- 

 face. In lettuce-forcing, one man will handle four times as 

 great an area after the plants are transplanted. These 

 estimates assume that the houses are convenient, with 

 facilities for watering with a hose. The larger the estab- 

 lishment, the less proportionate help does it require, if the 

 houses are so arranged that the workmen are not required 

 to walk more than 50 or 60 feet from any given point to 

 reach an opening into another house, and if they are not 

 obliged to pass back and forth out of doors while at their 

 work. It is, therefore, evident that for economy in both 

 heating and labor, a range of two or more parallel houses 

 is more satisfactory than a single house or than several 



