Hints on Vegetable and Fruit-Farming. 
81 
is about 2s. per bushel. Market-gardeners put peas between 
cabbages, and have many schemes for getting two crops from 
the same ground in the year ; but farmers would hardly get 
labour enough for this system of double cropping. Still, in 
many circumstances, it would be well for them to watch their 
opportunity, and take lessons from market-garden practice. 
Thus, to quote the Report before alluded to, it is said of a 
market-gardener, '"He sows onions, carrots, parsnips, spinach, 
peas and potatoes, in the early spring, after the winter green- 
stuff — such as hardy greens, or coleworts. Savoys, and purple- 
sprouting broccoli — has come off the land. After early cabbages, 
which should be cut in ordinary seasons by the end of Mav, he 
plants potatoes, scarlet runners, French beans, blue peas, beet, 
marrows, cucumbers and summer lettuces." Market-gardeners 
never lose a chance. Market-garden farmers are equally on the 
look-out for a " catch crop," and farmers who may add vegetable- 
growing to their business will do well to follow their example. 
Cauliflowers sometimes give most satisfactory returns, but 
as thev require protection during the winter, they cannot compete 
on anything like equal terms with those grown in Cornwall, 
France, and the Channel Islands. Occasionally there are 
winters through which cauliflowers would live, but the risk is 
too great to plant them on a large scale, therefore it is better 
to get a supply of plants grown under glass, or in protected 
places, and plant them out as early in the spring as possible. 
Farmhouse-gardens in many respects are admirably suited for 
rearing and protecting these plants, and indeed for producing 
early cauliflowers, which in some seasons are worth almost their 
weight in coppers and pay well for care. Cauliflowers must 
have good land and a deal of manure, with consideralj)le moisture. 
In other respects they are cultivated in the same way as cabbages ; 
the plants being reared in seed-beds and set out on the land 
when the weather permits, from 24 by 18 inches to 24 bv 24 
inches apart, depending upon the quality of the soil. Mitchell's 
Hardv Earlv, Early London — more delicate^ — and the Dwarf 
Mammoth, Veitch's Autumn Giant and Walcheren, are good 
sorts ; and it is best to arrange a succession of sorts, so that 
the supplv mav be continuous. 
Broccoli will bear ordinary winters, and should be sown so as 
to ensure a proper succession of heads.* It may easily be arranged 
that there should always be broccoli fit to cut. Thev are culti- 
vated like cauliflowers, and set the same distance apart. The 
• Mr. Shirley Hibberd, in his ' Profitable Gardening,' says, " It is a mark of 
good management if the gardener can cnt broccoli or canliflowers any day in the 
year, and to do this requires that sort of he^dwork which, as Cowper says, ' Fore- 
casts the fntnre whole.' " 
VOL. xvin.— ^. S. G 
