PREFACE VU 



scribe and make clear these improved methods, to 

 demonstrate how easily and inexpensively an asparagus 

 bed may be had in every garden, and how much pleas- 

 ure, health, and profit may be derived from the crop 

 have been the principal inducements to writing this 

 book. 



In a popular treatise on so widely distributed a 

 vegetable as asparagus, the cultivation of which had 

 been brought to a high state of de\'elopment many 

 centuries before the Christian era, there is little oppor- 

 tunity for originalit}'. All that the author has en- 

 deavored in this little volume has been to collecl, 

 arrange, classify, and systematize all obtainable facfts, 

 compare them with his own many 3'ears' experience in 

 asparagus culture, and present his inferences in a plain 

 and popular manner. Free use has been made of all 

 available literature, especially helpful among which 

 has been the Farmers' Bulletin No. 61 of the United 

 States Department of Agriculture, bj' R. B. Handy ; 

 also bulletins of the Missouri, New York, Ohio, New 

 Jersey, North Carolina, Maryland, ]\Iassachusetts, and 

 South Carolina and other experiment stations; the 

 files of American Agriculturist ; Gardener' s Chronicle, 

 from which descriptions of several ornamental species 

 by William Watson were condensed; Thome's " Flora 

 von Deutschland; " " Eintraegliche Spargelzucht, " 

 von Franz Goeschke; * ' Braunschweiger Spargelbucli, ' ' 



