EARLY POTATOES 343 



extra shoots. When the potatoes are up they are 

 dressed with nitrate of soda, and as much as 10 cwt. 

 to 15 cwt. per acre of that fertilizer are applied. 

 Pace is everything, and any outlay that will bring 

 the crop to hand two or three days earlier is justified 

 by the higher prices which prevail just when the 

 market opens. Something like 25 an acre having 

 thus been spent on rent and manure, without taking 

 the seaweed into account, no trifling returns are 

 needed to redeem the grower's position. His crop 

 should be ready to draw early in May, and he hopes 

 to begin with a yield approximating to I cwt. per 

 lace (a lace is about six-fifths of a rod, 160 laces 

 going to the Cornish acre), at a price approaching 

 153. per cwt., from which it declines to 8s. or even 

 5s. as the season advances. Of course, packing, 

 freight, and commission have to be deducted, and, 

 when the labour has been paid for, little profit remains 

 from the potato crop alone, often none at all, as had 

 generally been the case in the season of 1912, when the 

 crop was actually cut off by blight, an unprecedented 

 occurrence. As soon as potatoes are off and the 

 land cleaned up, the broccoli, which have been raised 

 in a seed bed and then transplanted once, are set out 

 and receive no further manuring, except occasionally 

 a little dressing of nitrate. They are ready to cut 

 from December to March, and may be sold on the 

 ground at 20 an acre, but good crops when marketed 

 by the grower may realize as much as 60 an 

 acre. 



The standard variety is a local " Cornish Early " 

 broccoli, of which the growers save their own seed, 

 but the stock is said to be deteriorating and to have 

 become coarser and later, with a tendency to throw 

 woolly heads. This is scarcely to be wondered at 



