practical papers —market gardening. 407 
in some of the sciences and arts, the science of gardening, es¬ 
pecially in the great west and northwest, can only and truly be 
said to be in its infancy. Probably not a single person in this 
convention who has reached twenty-five years, has failed to notice, 
time and again, the place on the farm that is denominated a gar¬ 
den, instead of being as it should be, a place of both beauty 
and profit, one of the most, if not the most unsightly and disa¬ 
greeable spots upon the farm. Here it may be asked, would you 
have every man a gardener? Gertainly, I would have every cul¬ 
tivator of the soil devote a portion of it to a garden. But would 
you have every cultivator become a market gardener ? The an¬ 
swer to this question brings me to the main subject upon which 
you have invited me to address you to-day; and the true answer 
to it is one that cannot be found in any books upon gardening 
that I have ever seen. They are mostly, if not all of them, writ¬ 
ten by eastern men, whose situation and circumstances are so dif¬ 
ferent from ours that he who follows them indiscriminately, will 
almost certainly be ruined. We must remember that at the east, 
there is a tendency to a deficiency in the supply of food, and that 
it is particularly so in all of the large’ cities, near which most of 
the market gardening is done, while at the west and northwest the 
tendency, with but very few exceptions, is in precisely the oppo¬ 
site direction; hence the very first question to be settled in con¬ 
sidering this subject is, have you a market for your crops when 
they are raised? If yes, then, have you a soil and location suita¬ 
ble for the purpose? A light sandy loam is perhaps the best of 
all soils for this purpose. You can raise as large crops upon a 
rich, heavy loam, with a cla^ subsoil, as you can upon a light, 
sandy loam, and perhaps with less manure, but if you are upon a 
heavy loam and your competitor upon a light soil, though you 
may be equally good as cultivators, his soil will give him from 
one to two weeks the advantage in time. This, of course, not 
only gives him the high prices for the early crops, but it gives him 
the control of the market. Hence your success is impossible, 
though you may have equal advantages with him in every other 
respect. 
Let me give you a single practical illustration of this. A num¬ 
ber of years since, I planted my early cucumbers in a very favor- 
t 
