72 



KITCHEN-GARDEN PLANTS. 



[chap. 



saved in England with great facility, if we would but take the pro- 

 per means ; that is to say, forbear from eating the earliest pods. 

 We ought always to set apart a row, or a piece of a row, for seed, 

 and resolve never to touch it till the seed be ripe. This is hardly 

 ever done : we keep eating on : above all things, we take the lirst : 

 those that we save for seed are such as have had the good fortune 

 to escape us, so that our seed of this important plant is generally 

 very bad ; it is but half ripe, and a great deal of it rots as soon as 

 it is put into the ground. If the seed of this plant be well ripened, 

 it will keep good, if kept in the pod, for several years ; but if 

 taken out of the pod, it cannot be relied on after the lirst year. It 

 is always the best way to keep it in the pod until it be sown, if 

 that be practicable. It continues to be nourished there, and nature 

 has excluded it completely from the air. 



ICo. BEET. — Some people enumerate several varieties of the 

 beet, and these of differe.it colours. There are but two cultivated 

 in our gardens, and the great sign of their perfection is their deep 

 blood colour, a deficiency in which respect is regarded as an 

 imperfection. One of these is tap-rooted, like a carrot, and the 

 other pretty nearly as much a bulb as the common garden turnip. 

 The seed of the beet is a little, round, rough pod, thick and hard, 

 and containing within it sometimes two, and sometimes three, black 

 seeds. The pod is sowed, for it is impossible to get the seed 

 out of it and to separate one from the other. To have fine beets, 

 the ground should be dug very deeply and made very line. There 

 ought to be no clods in it, especially for the tap-rooted beet ; for 

 clods turn aside the tap-root and spoil the shape of the beet. No 

 fresh dung, by any means ; for that causes side shoots to go out 

 in search of it, and thereby makes the root forked instead of 

 straight ; and, as in the case of carrots, a forked root is never 

 considered to be a good one. The ground being well and 

 deeply dug and broken, drills should be nicely made about two 

 feet apart, and the seed laid along at the depth of about an 

 inch and a half, and at about a couple of inches from each 

 other. The earth that came out of the drill should be put back 

 upon the seed, and should be pressed down upon it very hard, 

 \vith the head of the rake, the foot of man being too rude for 

 this purpose. When the plants come up, they should be thinned 

 to about nme inches apart in the row : the ground should be 

 nicely flat-hoe I and kept clean during the summer : in October the 



