364 THE NEW GARDENING 



There is a tendency to extend the frame culture of 

 vegetables among those who have learned to know and 

 appreciate degrees of flavour, partly because of the 

 earlier crops, and partly because vegetables from frames, 

 being invariably used young, are more delicate in flavour 

 than older produce from the open ground. Apart from 

 the question of quality, a person who grows vegetables, 

 both in frame and open, will find a natural impulse to 

 pull the former at an earlier stage than the latter. In 

 using frames he has a sense that he is expediting the 

 crops, and from first to last he is animated by the feeling 

 that he has to get them along and cleared away as quickly 

 as possible. Swift action and constant change are of the 

 very nature of the undertaking. This is not the case 

 with the ground crops. The question of bulk obtrudes 

 itself, and often develops until it assumes an importance 

 to which it is not entitled. Many a professional gardener 

 who draws vegetables, quite naturally, from frames at 

 the half-grown stage, becomes obsessed insensibly by 

 the craze for size with outdoor crops, and lets them stand 

 longer than they should. In some cases things go much 

 farther than this. Varieties are deliberately chosen 

 because they grow large, and they are subjected to a 

 system of culture which, in consideration of the ex- 

 penditure on labour and manure, would suifice, other- 

 wise directed, to give larger quantities, in successions of 

 smaller produce, and of greatly superior quality. 



Frame-culture tends to make connoisseurs, because 

 pulling and gathering vegetables young means delicacy 

 of flavour. And under frame-culture may be reckoned 

 the use of cloches. 



The wise employer of garden labour will not encourage 

 the devotion of large breadths of ground to vegetables, 

 unless, indeed, his household is a very large one, and 



