January 1, 1910 
About Vegetables. 
The Kitchen Garden. 
Operations for the Month. 
Seeds of any of the following may be 
sown during this month :— 
Beans (French) 
Beet (Silver) 
Celeraic 
Celery (Red and White) 
Oress , 
Mustard 
Onions (for Salad) 
Radish 
Rape 
Scotch Kale 
Spinach (New Zealand) 
And for Early Planting :— 
Broccoli 
Brussels Sprouts 
Cabbage 
Cauliflower 
— Watering and Mulching. — 
The present month is _ generally 
exceedingly trying both to the vegetable 
The principal operation 
is watering, continual and regular water- 
ing to sustain a free quick growth in the 
plants, and not to allow them to flag or 
droop for a single moment. The adyan- 
tage of well enriched, well mulched beds 
will be very obvious, considerably 
lightening the labor of cultivation and 
materially affecting the results. 
and its grower. 
— Weeding and Hosging. — 
Weeds must be kept in check, all 
exhausted crops and remains of plants 
should be removed to the rubbish heap, 
and beds lately oceupied kept lightly 
hoed or the soil renewed and well 
enriched ready for another planting, 
— The Celery Trenches. — 
Celery trenches must have copious 
supplies of water and liquid manure. 
Additional trenches can be prepared 
either for a fresh sowing or the reception 
of young plants. 
— Attention to Seedlings, — 
The seedlings from recent sowings 
e 
THE AUSTRALIAN GARDENER. 
should be carefully thinned to allow each 
little plant to develop 
itself. Carrets, turnips, parnips, and 
lettuce should all be thus dealt with, 
Water before thinning, and again after, 
to prevent disturbance of the rovts. 
ample room 
— Melons, Cucumbers, &c. — 
Give plenty of water and liquid 
manure to melons while the fruit is 
growing and swelling, but lessen the 
supplies as they begin to show signs of 
ripening. Melons require to be artifici- 
ally fertilised when in flower. Cucum-— 
bers, marrows, and pumpkins want even 
more abundant supplies of water. All 
this family is benefited by having their 
growth regulated, stopped, and thinned. 
Pinch the fruit- bearing shoots a joint or 
so beyond the fruit, and in the case of a 
heavy crop of melons thin out the fruit. 
Cut marrows and cucumbers when they 
have attained about half their normal 
size. The flavor is incomparably superior 
at this stage. 
— A Spinach Tip. — 
If you like spinach, try the New 
Zealand, a hardy variety which grows the 
whole season through, and is capable of 
doing good wotk while the majority of 
the kitchen garden plants are held up by 
the heat. Seed of this variety must be 
soaked in hot water before being sown. 
The casing is too hard for quick germina- 
tion if the soaking is not done. Place 
the seedling plants 15 inches apart. The 
midrib must be taken out of the leaves 
before the cooking. 
— The Tomatoes. — 
Keep the soil moist round tomatoes, 
never allowing it to entirely dry out. 
See that the plants are firmly secured to 
the supports, and pinch out the laterals 
ag they appear. When they blossom is 
the time to increase the crop by artificial 
fertilization. Many growers do this by 
shaking the supports in the middle of the 
day, thus causing a distribution of the 
pollen, but a surer method is to brush 
the anthers lightly, so that it is wafted 
about by the breeze. : 
— Asparagus Beds. = 
Do not neglect asparague beds at this 
period; it is important to keep up the 
supplies of water and liquid manure. 
17 
Water in the Garden, 
In his useful little book, “ The A.B.C. 
of Australian Vegetable Growing,’ Mr. 
Herbert J. Rumsey, a practical seedsman 
and nurseryman, of New South Wales, 
gives much useful advice on the above 
subject, which we extract the 
following :— 
from 
Out of every hundred pounds of green 
vegetables taken from the garden no less 
than from 70 to 95 pounds is water. The 
following percentages of moisture are 
taken from reliable authorities by Pro- 
fessor Massey :— 
Artichokes, 80 per cent. 
Beets, 88 
Carrots, 89.79 
Cabbages, 90.52 
Celery, 84.10 
Cucumber, 95.99 
Lettuce, 94 
Onion, 87.55 
Parsnip, 83.20 
Potato, 79.75 
Peas, 12,62 
Pumpkin, 92,27 
Radish, 93.30 
Rhubarb, 91.67 
Spinach, 92.42 
Sweet Potatoes, ‘71.26 
Tomato, 93.64 
Turnip, 89.49 
Therefore we require, at any rate, 
nearly as much water in the soil as the 
_ weight of the crop we wish to produce. — 
But very large quantities are also 
evaporated through the leaves of the 
plant. Itis estimated that plants lose by 
evaporation from 200 to 1,000 pounds for 
every pound of dry matter, so that it is 
probable that to makea 10 pound cabbage 
we want several hundred pounds of water 
and one pound of solid plant food; this 
is quoted to show the immense impor- 
tance of water to the crop. All the 
plant foods are absorbed by the fine root 
hairs dissolved in large quantities of 
water. It. is therefore essential that this 
. Water must be supplied in some way or 
other, There are very few localities in 
which the rainfall during the year would 
not be sufficient for gardening purposes’ 
if it were to fall just when it was 
