346 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Apr. 15 



NOTES OF TRAVEL 



I BY A. I. ROOT . 



HIGH-PRESSURE GARDENING IN CUBA. 



Most of the gardening in and around Ha- 

 vana is done by Chinamen, and the Chinese 

 gardens look very pretty; even where they 

 are located by a running stream that is on 

 a higher level than their garden, they 

 seem to have a preference for hand-water- 

 ing. I believe most of their gardening is 

 done by hand. Their beds for plants are, I 

 judge, not more than four feet wide. The 

 paths are very straight, their beds fine and 

 level. Having the paths so near together is 

 somewhat expensive, but it enables them to 

 step over the bed from one path to another. 

 As we ride through on the cars, these long 

 narrow beds of different kinds of vegetables 

 look like ribbons of various tints and colors. 

 The Chinese have a way of serving up rad- 

 ishes on the table that I think might be 

 copied in the States. They grow mostly 

 the small round radishes. The tops are 

 cut off so they will stand upright on a 

 plate, the roots up in the air. Now, to 

 make them attract attention they cut off the 

 tap-root of the radish, then slit down through 

 the red or pink skin so that this bright skin 

 will roll over like the leaf of a rose. They 

 have a way of making them look so exactly 

 like a dinner-plate filled with beautiful 

 roses that again and again I started with 

 delight, and was just going to say, " What 

 beautiful roses! " when I discovered they 

 were not roses, but radishes. If prepared 

 just before they are put on the table, the 

 inside of the radish is a pearly white, like 

 a rose with a white center. This contrast 

 with the bright red or pink of the peel 

 makes them wonderfully attractive, and al- 

 most everybody will want to get hold of one 

 to see if it tastes as well as it looks. The 

 Chinese seem to have rare skill — at least in 

 Cuba — in making all sorts of vegetables look 

 tempting. At the Chinese restaurants you 

 get every thing at a much lower price than 

 anywhere else; and as a rule it is served in 

 very nice order; and you generally have a 

 generous allowance of fancy vegetables and 

 garden-stuff thrown in. 



Down near Giiines there are several miles 

 of rich fertile land, so nearly level that it 

 is irrigated by running the water in furrows 

 as they do in the great West. Here many 

 Americans are engaged in growing toma- 

 toes, peppers, summer squashes, and avarie- 

 ty of garden stuff, which is shipped to Chi- 

 cago,New York,andothernorthern cities. At 

 the time I was there, they were shipping off 

 carloads of what I should call green toma- 

 toes. There was not a bit of red visible on 

 them anywhere. They said they would be 

 ripe by the time they reached their destina- 

 tion. One of the gardeners had just re- 

 ceived word that his tomatoes brought in 

 Chicago $3.50 a crate. Now, as this crate 



is less than a bushel he got a very good 

 price and a very unusual one. But the com- 

 mission man wrote him that the extra price 

 was because his tomatoes were of good 

 shape, all of a size, all perfect, and neatly 

 packed. Mango peppers are grown by the 

 acre. They are shipped green like the to- 

 matoes. Summer squashes and other gar- 

 den-stuff are in some demand; but I think 

 the tomatoes stand pretty much at the head. 

 Irish potatoes are grown a great deal, but 

 they are troubled as they are in Bermuda, 

 with blight. The tomato-growers find that 

 spraying with a Bordeaux mixture and some 

 other chemical is quite an important part of 

 the work in the prevention of blight on to- 

 matoes. The big tomato-worm troubles 

 them a great deal; and I saw a man going 

 along with a pair of sheep-shears cutting 

 the worms in two. He said that was about 

 the quickest and cheapest way to make a 

 " sure thing " of them. I suggested a flock 

 of turkeys, as described in our tomato-book, 

 and I thought of Miss Emma Hochstein's 

 200 young turkeys. They did not seem to 

 have caught on to the turkey business, how- 

 ever, for keeping down the tomato-worm. 

 This same worm troubles the tobacco-grow- 

 er. I did not mean to write up the tobacco 

 industry, even if it is true that tobacco 

 comes in second among the three great sta- 

 ples of Cuba. Didn't I tell you what these 

 staples were? Well, they say sugar-cane 

 comes in first; tobacco second, and honey 

 third. I think the tobacco crop is the only 

 one where they go to the trouble of hauling 

 out stable manure from livery-stables in Ha- 

 vana. The tobacco crop is also almost the 

 only one where irrip^ation is largely prac- 

 ticed. The water is, in many localities, 

 hauled from deep wells. They have a 

 bucket holding a barrel or more, and a mule 

 or a yoke of oxen pulls it to the surface or 

 a little higher, where it is dumped into a 

 big tank, and iron pipes carry it from the 

 tank to different parts of the tobacco-field. 

 Some of the more enterprising growers have 

 gasoline-engines to pump the water up, and 

 small farmers carry water by hand out of 

 the brooks. 



I do not suppose that the growing of su- 

 gar-cane can be properly called high-pres- 

 sure gardening; and yet there is a lot of 

 money in it where it is managed on the 

 high-pressure principle. It is said that a 

 crop of sugar-cane maj' be grown on the 

 same ground for a hundred years, without 

 any manuring; and some go so far as to 

 say it can be done without any cultivation; 

 but it is not quite true. The most success- 

 ful cane-fields near the great sugar-mills 

 are managed so as to grow not more than 

 ten or twelve crops on the same ground with- 

 out some kind of rotation. It is true that 

 the leaves stripped from the cane go a great 

 way toward fertilizing the ground; but I 

 think the crop is greatly benefited by plow- 

 ing between the rows after the leaves have 

 decayed somewhat. It is true, however, 

 that, when the cane is cut off close to the 

 ground, it very soon sprouts up again, and 



