198 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



And I will say here, that no vegetable I have shown here is 

 an exaggeration, by any means. The drought has been very 

 severe in Essex County, and our vegetables have not been 

 overgrown. It has not been my endeavor to produce here 

 large specimens, but simply good specimens, showing the 

 varieties in perfection. This, I say, is a good specimen of 

 the new carrot. It has a small and short top, which is very 

 important. You will go by a field of carrots sometimes, where 

 the tops are up to your knees or higher, and you will think 

 that that man has an immense crop of carrots, but when he 

 comes to dig them, you will find they are almost all tops, with 

 very little bottoms. You will find a great many of those 

 carrots will have run up to seed, which they should not do. 

 That is the result of bad seed. 



The gr.ound for carrots may be prepared very much as for 

 onions. It is not so important to put the manure on in the 

 fall ; but if you have manure, it is not a bad place for it. It 

 is not well to plough deep even for the carrot crop ; better 

 results are obtained by ploughing shallow. The manure 

 should be applied early, and ploughed in, I will say, six inches 

 deep, and then the land allowed to lie until about the 25th of 

 May. You may plough the land any time in April, when you 

 can best attend to it. By ploughing it then, and getting your 

 manure in, you get one good crop of weeds started before you 

 put your seed in at all, which is very important, and no labor 

 has been expended for it. Then, when you get ready, plough 

 your land the second time, which will put the manure near 

 the surface, where it belongs. Then harrow and drag, as I 

 explained before, and your land is in perfect condition for the 

 seed-sower. If you sow your seed accurately and correctly, 

 one pound of good seed is sufficient for an acre. If you put 

 in too much seed, a great deal of labor is required to thin out 

 the plants, more labor than weeding, so that it is very im- 

 portant to sow just the right quantity of seed. And I will 

 say just here, that the straighter you have the rows, and the 

 nearer they are of an equal distance apart, the more easy the 

 cultivation, and the better you can use the implements that I 

 have shown. It is very important to have straight rows in 

 order to use these implements successfully, so that care in 

 sowing is very important. I would sow the seed about the 



