18S6 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



WHAT TO DO, AND HOW TO BE HAPPY WHILE DOING IT. 



CJontinued from June 15. 



CHAPTER XIX. 



If yc be willing- and ohodiciit, yt' shall eat the good of the land.— Isatah 1: in. 



I have before mentioned, incidentally, the 

 importance of selling our crops at a good 

 price after they were raised. To do this, as 

 well as to do any thing else well, the heart 

 must be in it. Tlie text above strikes at the 

 root of the matter — yon must be iciUhuj. 

 Yonr work must be a pleasure and not a 

 drudgery. 



One of the lirst things to sell is lettuce. 

 After we sold out our crop of lettuce from 

 the greenhouse, by a little bad management 

 we had no nice lettuce toolfer our customers 

 for some little time. Finally, however, here 

 and there a head began to be suitable. What 

 fun it was to see them improve and enlarge 

 in just 24 hours! Yts, I learned to see a 

 difference in the heads between morning 

 and night and between night and morning. 

 What fun it was to go over the whole plot 

 and carefully pick out sucli as would answer, 

 until we could say, '' There, I guess there 

 are about as many as the boys on the wagon 

 will dispose of to-day." They start out at 

 six o'clock. When they get home at noon 

 one of the first things to inquire about is, 

 " Did you have enough lettuce?'' Some- 

 times the reply would be, that it just went 

 round, and tiiat was all; at other times, 

 "• No, we did not have half enougli. Why, 

 it seemed as if everybody wanted lettuce 

 to-day." 



By and by the heads began to till up faster; 

 and wasn't it fun to get a great basket full 

 that were just right! All of the good heavy 

 ones we got a nickel apiece for ; smaller 

 ones, two for a nickel ; while those that 

 weighed a pound or more would readily 

 bring ten cents. A little later, and some of 

 the Boston-market lettuce-heads began to 

 show symptoms of wanting to send up a 

 seed-stalk. As this Boston-market lettuce 

 is one of the staple sorts, especially for 

 greenhouses and cold frames, I will give a 

 cut of it here, which is kindly loaned me by 

 Peter Henderson. 



BOSTON - MARKET r.ETTIJCK WHEN IT IS 

 KEADY TO CUT. 



When the he.ads begin to burst and to send 

 up a seed-stalk, the matter has changed. 

 Instead of rejoicing to see the growth made 

 each 2-1 hours, we begin to wish they would 

 not grow quite so fast, until we could sell 

 them off a little. Mr. Ikishnell (who is, 

 I think, the oldest one among us) began to 

 tell me that I was going to lose some of them 

 because they would burst and start up to 

 seed before we could possibly dispose of 

 them. I told him to just let me do the gath- 

 ering, and I thought I could fix it. The 

 next morning I went over the whole patchy 

 and counted to see how many heads there 

 were that would have to be gathered that 

 morning. Then I cut all that would not 

 possibly bear to stand another day. Af tet 

 this I cut the next worse, until I got as 

 many as they could possibly sell. Then I 

 spoke to the men on the wagon something 

 as follows : 



" Boys, if you can manage to sell all these 

 heads of lettuce to-day, I think \ye can take 

 all to-morrow morning that will, bie so fai' 

 along they must be cut, and ?o on. Now, 

 suppose you make a little extra effort to push 

 the lettuce, even if you don't sell so much of 

 something else, that we may avoid losing 

 any." 



What do you think the result was? Why, 

 the tirst thing when they got home was to 

 tell me, " Mr. Root, we sold every head of 

 your lettuce, and could have sold more too 

 if we had had it with us." 



The next day I did the same thing, and so 

 on, keeping ahead of the ripening until w^e 

 had a little shower. Tlien Dame Nature 

 was too much for me— the heads suddenly 

 burst open— a great number of them. 



Let me here digress a little, to say that I 

 had for some time had my eye on certain 

 heads that I wished to save for seed— some 

 that had made great big hard heads which 

 remained a great while, ready to cut, with- 

 out bursting open at all. Now you can read- 

 ily see that, had my whole patch been like 

 these few choice heads, it would have been 

 a great help indeed in working off the crop. 

 Not only this, they got so large and heavy 

 before tliey burst that we readily obtained 

 ten cents eacli for them. Well, after the 

 sliower I put stakes about tiiese choice heads, 

 marking them"' For Seed," so nobody would 

 make a mistake and cut them. Then we 



