298 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



Annual vegetables fall into two kinds of classes: long and 

 short season, and hardy and tender. According to these classi- 

 fications must the garden be planned, in companion or succes- 

 sion or whole-season planting. Companion cropping means the 

 planting of short-season with long-season crops, the former to 

 be picked before the latter need all the space. Thus lettuce or 

 radish goes between cabbage or staked tomatoes. Succession 

 cropping means the planting of one short-season crop after 

 another, as beans following spinach. It is, on the whole, not 

 wise to put other plants in the same rows with tall-growing 

 plants, such as pole beans or corn, but rows of short-season 

 plants may go between. Squashes and corn, how^ever practical 

 they may be w^hen raised in combination on the farm, do not 

 yield their best when combined in the garden. 



This planning should all be carried out to the last detail, so 

 as to keep the garden w^orking at all times. The spacing de- 

 pends, of course, on whether horse or hand culture is to be 

 used; but in either case the rows should not be too near to- 

 gether for the plants' sake, nor too far apart for the worker's. 

 A list of distances is given below. When finally the plan, 

 probably after several changes, has been finished, it should be 

 carefully inked, or marked clearly wdth a lead pencil that will 

 not rub. 



If the garden is an old one the last-year plan will of course 

 be of use in planning, for even in so small an area as a vege- 

 table garden rotation can be practiced. In this two things may 

 be remembered: first, a crop should not always follow itself, as 

 beans following beans, or tomatoes following tomatoes; second, 

 it is well to keep the leguminous crops together, and to follow 

 them by non-leguminous crops in the next year. The following 

 crop then gets the advantage of the nitrogen left by the leg- 

 umes. 



The plan herewith reproduced is for a fairly large family, and 

 is made according to general tastes. To suit family preferences 

 the gardener will vary the quantities planted. (In my garden, 

 for example, I never plant parsnips or turnips, but I make up 

 for this with marrows, cauliflower and okra.) The distances 

 given on the plan are for hand cultivation, for w'hich some of 

 the rows could be closer. Yet as cultivatmg in narrow spaces 



