4i 6 WISCONSIN STATE AG HI CULTURAL SOCIETY. 
About the first of May, nice purple shoots will begin to show 
themselves above the ground, and you may begin to cut, though 
you must do it very sparingly this season, or you will injure your 
beautiful bed for many years to come. You are now at the begin¬ 
ning of the third year, and you will get your first returns. The 
bed must be kept clear of weeds, and each succeeding spring, give 
it a good coat of manure, and work it in as I have directed. The 
fourth season, you may realize some profit from it, and the fifth, a 
full crop. From this time on, you may expect an annual crop, as 
well as a good profit from it the balance of your life, if you will 
continue to care for it. There is a bed in my father’s garden, 
which father has told me was there when he was a little boy 7 or 
8 years old, and he is now in his 83d year. 
The friends of Conover’s Collossal have claimed that this va¬ 
riety would produce a crop one year earlier, than the common 
kinds. My own experience has not proved the assertion to be 
true, although I think it an improved variety and very cheerfully 
recommend it for general cultivation. 
Let us now turn for a few moments to another branch of tbe 
business, viz.: making sales. At this point we are so differently 
situated from our eastern gardeners, that their books are about 
worthless to us. The markets of Boston, New York and Phila¬ 
delphia are so large, that the produce of any one gardener may be 
thrown upon it at any time, and in almost any quantity that he 
can produce, and it will produce no perceptible result. If the 
market is very much depressed, his withholding it will not raise it. 
If, on the contrary, prices are high, the produce of one garden will 
not perceptibly depress them. Here, upon the contrary, you will 
find that it will require all of your care and skill to keep the 
market from utterly breaking down, and thus making your crops 
nearly worthless after you have raised them. I am often told that 
I have a good market, the best one in the state, and so on. Well 
I think I have a good market, and yet, fora number of years past, 
there has been no time during the rush of any particular crops, 
that 1 could not have broken down the price so completely that it 
would have been ruinous, both to myself and others, and very 
often it has, and I presume will again, require the utmost care to 
keep from doing it. For instance, one year ago last fall, I had a 
