NURSERIES 



NURSERIES 



4Sj 



Them, Harper & Bros., New York (1895); Nina L. 

 Marshall, The Mushroom Book, Doubleday, Page 

 & Co. (1901); Charles Mcllvaine, One Thousand 

 American Fungi, Bowen-Merrill Co., Indianapolis, 

 Ind.; Charles H. Peck, Reports of New York State 

 Botanist in the Reports of the New York State 

 Museum of Natural History, 1879 to present. 



NURSERIES. 



The special development of nursery agriculture 

 is recent. Nurseries were in existence in North 

 America a hundred years and more ago, but they 

 were isolated, relatively uniinportant, and few in 

 number. In 1900 there were 2,029 nursery farms 

 (establishments in which nursery stock constitutes 

 at least 40 per cent of the products) in the United 

 States, comprising 165,780 acres; and in 1901 

 there were 1,561 acres devoted to nurseries in 

 Canada. The nursery business is understood in 

 this country to be devoted to the raising for sale 

 of woody plants and perennial herbs, and does not 

 include the raising of florists' plants and vege- 

 tables, although an establishment or place in which 

 any plant is reared for sale or transplanting is 

 properly a nursery. Aside from the commercial 

 nurseries, there are city park departments, ceme- 

 teries, florist establishments and private estates 

 that rear vast quantities of plants. 



The total value of the commercial nursery prod- 

 ucts in the last census year (1899) in the United 

 States was $10,086,136. The states returning a 

 product of more than a half million dollars are: 

 New York, 237 establishments, $1,703,354; Iowa, 

 104 establishments, $636,543; Illinois, 126 estab- 

 lishments, $610,971 ; Ohio, 147 establishments, 

 $538,534; California, 141 establishments, $533,038; 

 Pennsylvania, 95 establishments, $515,010. The 

 average size of the nursery farms was 81.7 acres, 

 and the average value per acre of the land was 

 $84. In Canada, by far the larger part of the 

 nurseries are in the province of Ontario. Prom the 

 other provinces the acreage is returned as follows: 

 Quebec, 193; Manitoba, 90; British Columbia, 72; 

 Nova Scotia, 37; New Brunswick, 35; Prince 

 Edward Island, 17; The Territories, 20. 



As a type of farm organization and management, 

 the nursery business has received no careful study 

 in this country. It differs from all other forms of 

 agriculture in many of its fundamental features, 

 particularly in its business organization. A high- 

 grade nursery presents perhaps the most perfect 

 division into departments of any agricultural busi- 

 ness; to illustrate this feature, a rather full dis- 

 cussion of an organization for a $50,000 nursery 

 business is presented in the following pages. 



Inasmuch as nursery farming is not the raising 

 of a single crop, or even a single series of crops, 

 and as the various nursery crops are treated in the 

 Cyclopedia of American Horticulture, the crop- 

 practice phases are not discussed here. The nursery 

 business is characterized by the relatively small 

 equipment in machinery, and the great outlay for 

 labor. In 1899, the labor outlay in the nurseries 

 enumerated in the census was considerably more 



than one-fifth of the total value of the products. On 

 the other hand, the outlay for implements was only 

 5 per cent of the products, and for fertilizers it is 

 surprisingly small, being only $139,512 as against 

 $2,305,270 for labor. This low fertilizer cost is the 

 result of the custom of growing trees on land that 

 has not. been "treed," especially fruit-stock, wiiich 

 must attain a certain size and appearance at a 

 specified time. There has been much speculation as 

 to the reason why trees do not succeed well after 

 trees ; but this should be no more inexplicable than 

 similar experience with other crops. Rotation is 

 no doubt as necessary in nurseries as in other kinds 

 of farming. No rotation systems have been worked 

 out, however, and nursery production is to that de- 

 gree not conducted on a scientific basis. Great atten- 

 tion has been givento developing skill in propagating 

 the plants and in tilling and handling the stock, 

 but little is known of the underlying soil and fer- 

 tility requirements. Experiments have demonstrated 

 (see Roberts aiid Bailey, for example, in Cornell bul- 

 letins) that the failure of trees to succeed trees with 

 good results is not due to lack of plant-food alone. 



Although certain kinds of nursery farming may 

 be classed with the intensive agricultural industries, 

 as a whole the average returns per acre are not 

 remarkably large for a special i dustry. The cen- 

 sus shows the average value per acre of the prod- 

 uct not fed to live-stock (comprising by far the 

 greater part of the total product) to have been 

 $60.84 for the whole United States, being about six 

 times the acreage value for all crops. The average 

 value from flower and plant farms, however, was 

 $431.83. The distribution of the property in nur- 

 sery-farms is mostly in land and its improvements 

 exclusive of buildings, this item being for the 

 United States $6,841, in a total average valuation 

 of $9,436 per farm. In buildings there were invested 

 $2,101 to each farm, in implements $266, and in 

 live-stock $228. Each nursery farm averaged 

 $4,971 in the value of, its product. 



The American nursery grows such a different 

 class of products from the European establishment 

 that organization studies of the two are not com- 

 parable. The American nurseries grow relatively 

 large quantities of fruit trees, and these are not 

 trained to special or individual forms. The busi- 

 ness is conducted, for the most part, in a wholesale 

 way, with a consequent small value for each piece 

 in the product. As the country fills up and special 

 tastes develop, and as new or untreed land is more 

 difficult to secure, a new line of studies will need 

 to be made of the economics of nursery agriculture. 



There is no- good separate literature on the nur- 

 sery business, although there are books on nursery 

 practice, as Bailey's "Nursery- Book," Puller's 

 "Propagation of Plants," and chapters in the lead- 

 ing fruit books. The American Association of Nur- 

 serymen publishes annual proceedings, and there 

 are special journals. In Vol. I of this Cyclopedia 

 (page 193) is a discussion of the capital required 

 for establishing an up-to-date nursery. Pollowing 

 is advice on the equipment needed for an average 

 nursery, by E. Albertson and W. C. Reed, of Indiana 

 (comprising the remainder of this article): 



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