MAR.] 



THE GARDENER. 



105 



obtained and cut the crop, remove the litter from the 

 trenches, and fill them ^vith rich mould, into which the 

 fibres of the asparagus may strike freely. The disad- 

 vantage of forcing asparagus severely is, that it will 

 not bear a repetition of the same treatment for three 

 years — a serious matter with a vegetable which cannot 

 bear forcing at all until it is four years' old, double the 

 age sufficient for seakale and rhubarb raised from seed. 



A rich, deep, and sandy loam is the most suitable 

 for those three valuable plants, and if the soil be natu- 

 rally different, it must be rendered appropriate, as 

 nearly as possible, for asparagus, by combination with 

 sea sand, loam, decomposed turf, and a large quantity 

 of the richest manure, such as that from a. slaughter- 

 house. Seakale does not demand so much depth of 

 rank soil as asparagus, or rhubarb, which is tap-rooted. 

 Sea-weed is an admirable condiment in their food ; 

 the method of propagating them all is almost the same. 

 After deep trenching and blending of the manuring 

 substances with the bottom layer of mould, and 

 throughout the whole of it, form the ground (for aspa- 

 ragus) into beds four feet wide, with alleys of two feet 

 intervening, and to prevent any future irregularities in 

 dressing the beds and digging the alleys, fix short 

 stout stakes permanently at every corner of each bed, 

 60 that by stretching the line from end to end during 

 those operations, the beds may be kept at their original 

 breadth : mark two drills nine inches from the edges 

 of the beds, and one in the centre fifteen inches from 

 those outer ones ; drop the seed in patches (to be 

 thinned afterwards), and cover it with an inch of earth. 

 You may take a crop of onions and radishes (very 

 thinly sown broadcast) the first year. The distances 

 for seakale and rhubarb between the drills should be 

 2 feet, and if the seed have been dropped irregularly 

 in the drill, the plants must be thinned out to two or 

 2 J feet apart. Economy of seed, however, demands 



