CHAPTER VIII. 
SEAKALE AND ASPARAGUS. 
Cas. Will you sup with me to-night, Casca ? 
Casca. No, I am promised forth. 
Cas. Will you dine with me to-morrow ? 
Casca. Ay, if I be alive, and your mind hold, and your 
dinner worth the eating. 
Cas. Good : I will expect you. 
Julius Casar, L, 2. 
f PIESE two elegant vegetables agree pretty nearly in 
their requirements and their uses, and whoever can 
grow one satisfactorily will find it an _ easy matter to 
grow the other. To speak of their respective qualities is 
needless ; it is a subject for a gastronomic essay, and a fine 
subject too. In a book intended to assist the work of the 
garden, it is more to the purpose to say that these vegetables 
come in at a time when there is usually nothing else in the 
way of vegetables obtainable except cabbage and spinach, and 
even these may run short if the winter has been exceptionally 
trying. As no home is complete without a stereoscope, so no 
garden is complete without at least one bed each of asparagus 
and seakale, and the question with the uninitiated perhaps will 
be “how much ground shall I devote to these estimable plants? 
It must be understood then, at starting, that as regards the 
relative bulk of food produced, seakale is certainly the more 
profitable of the two. As to their relative gastronomic merits 
we have nothing to say. A general advice may, therefore, be 
hazarded, that a bed of seakale, twenty yards in length by 
two yards wide, may suffice for most families to begin with ; 
and two beds, twenty yards in length and four feet wide (with 
two feet alley between), devoted to asparagus, may also be 
enough for a beginning. If pinched for space, begin with 
half these quantities, and take time to determine whether to 
do more or less in future. You need not think of forcing at 
the first start, because 3 7 ou can buy roots for that purpose ; 
