P H OKTE^Cca 
PRICE, THREE CENTS 
Sl.oo PER YEAR. 
NEW YORK, FEBRUARY lo 1854 
VOL. LIII. No. 2298 
IMPORTED PLANT FOOD. 
WHAT PACKAGE SHALL WE USE FOR IT? 
The Problem on the Great Arlington Gardens. 
Those who keep the least live stock use most stable 
manure per acre! At first thought, that statement 
may seem overdrawn to some farmers who have never 
personally studied the intensive farming that is carried 
on close to our large cities, yet it is true. To obtain 
the facts for the following articles, I recently visited 
the great market-gardening district about Arlington, 
Mass., where intensive soil culture is probably con¬ 
ducted with greater skill than on any other area of 
equal size in America. These great gardens are located 
on high-priced lands worth 31,000 and upwards 
a light soil, almost worthless 
an acre. Originally 
for growing 
crops,this tract 
has been s o 
heavily m a n - 
ured and ferti¬ 
lized for the 
past 40 years 
that it has be¬ 
come dark-col¬ 
ored, heavy and 
wonderfully 
fertile. It jnust 
be so in order to 
pay the interest 
on $1,000 per 
acre in these 
times of low 
prices and 
fierce competi¬ 
tion. To stable 
manure is due 
most of the 
credit of restor¬ 
ing these lands 
to fertility. 
When we come 
to speak of 
maintaining 
that fertility 
we can tell an¬ 
other story. Up 
to within a com¬ 
paratively few 
years, manure 
was used al¬ 
most entirely. 
Of course, it 
would not pay 
to grow and 
feed out ordi¬ 
nary crops of 
grain and hay 
on such farms. 
It was far 
cheaper and 
easier to buy the manure from the great horse stables 
in Boston and nearby towns. Therefore these farms 
have not been made rich by the home manufacture of 
their own crops, but rather at the expense of lands in 
other parts of the country. The stable manure that 
has been absorbed by these lands represents the refuse 
of oats grown in Wisconsin and Illinois and hay from 
Maine, New York and other sections. In other words 
these Arlirgton gardens have grown rich on the cream 
of other and more distant farms. You see the point— 
all this fertility has been imported —it must be bought 
for cash in some form, and the question we propose to 
answer in these articles is whetber manure is still the 
cheapest form in which this fertility can be bought. 
We ask the reader to consider three phases of the 
matter, and shall therefore describe the methods of 
Glass Has Made 
a New Business. 
An ordinary 
farmer is filled 
with wonder at 
an inside view 
of one of these 
glass houses. 
On the outside, 
a thermometer 
may register a 
tem perature 
below zero, but 
once inside the 
door you find 
yourself in a 
warm, balmy 
atmosphere, amid thousands of living, vigorous plants. 
The market gardener who passes half of his winter 
in such a house never really loses his hold on spring 
and summer, and fails to realize how like a touch of 
A'Sample of New England Rye from a Massachusetts Fertilizer Farm. Fig. 29, 
more of Bradley’s fertilizer. Our Western readers 
get a view of an old New England lane in this pic¬ 
ture. When they realize that one ton of this rye 
straw will sell for more than the entire crop from 
some single Western acres they will realize that the 
business of New England grain-growing is not killed 
yet. 
Dcyclopmcnts in the Business. 
These Arlington gardeners are mostly Americans 
who follow their fathers and grandfathers on the 
soil. While some farmers in many other sections not 
only take the farms their fathers cultivate, but inherit 
their father’s practices and prejudices against a 
change of method as well, these men have been alive 
to the changes elsewhere in their business, and have 
studied methods of changing the old plans so as to 
