Thinning and Transplanting. — i6i 



people who obtain their supply of vegetables in the open market 

 have no idea what luxury the small and tender hearts of half-grown 

 lettuce afford. Try it once by thinning drilled lettuce to three 

 or four inches apart, and when they have nicely begun to head, 

 pulling up every other plant, and preparing just the young 

 hearts for the table. These are some of the pleasures in the 

 garden that mere money cannot buy. 



In a general way I have yet to add that the proper distances 

 among thinned plants, when these are yet very small, appear 

 comparatively large ; and sometimes people have not the nerve 

 to slash down and throw away thousands of nice plants which 

 as yet, appear to have an abundance of room. But this has to 

 be done. Whatever distance is decided upon as the best for the 

 particular crop, and in any particular case, should be strictly 

 adhered to, and no 

 foolish sentimentality 

 stand in the way of 

 making the distances 

 large enough. It is 

 much safer to err in 

 favor of giving too 

 much space, than in 

 favor of too little. 



Transplanting. — 

 I am not a particular 

 friend of transplanting, 

 and avoid it wherever 

 I can. In theory, transplanting, which is a sort of root pruning, 

 induces early fruit production in tomatoes, t%g plants, etc., early 

 headmg in lettuce, cauliflower, cabbage, and root development, 

 such as is indispensable in good plants for setting outdoors. For 

 this reason, gardeners practice, and writers advocate, repeated 

 shifting, repotting or transplanting of all sorts of vegetable plants, 

 in particular, also, of tomato, ^g^ plant, peppers, cabbage, celery, 

 etc. In practice, transplanting, with its unavoidable root 

 mutilation, is a stab at the plant's vitality, and acts as a more or 

 less serious check to its growth, thus invariably dwarfing it in 

 some measure. Sometimes, if the operation was done under 

 favorable circumstances — in a moist atmosphere, and absence of 

 direct sunlight — it is certainly followed by earlier fruit production 

 or earlier heading. At the same time it also and invariably 

 results in reduced size of plant or head, and reduced aggregate 

 yield of fruit. Should less favorable conditions be ruling at the 

 time of the transplanting operation, however, the atmosphere be 

 dry and the sun bright, the plant will receive a set-back which 

 cripples and retards it for a long time, so that the untransplanted 

 plant will come even sooner to maturity. 

 II 



Onions left unthinned. 



