198 QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. {lL Manr., 1902. 
Lettuce—Make monthly sowings. Plant out only small quantities at a 
time, allowing 15 inches between each plant. You can give your lettuce 
beautiful white hearts by tying the plant tightly round and round with soft 
string or banana fibre, thus preventing the rain, dew, and light from penetrating 
inside it. About ten days will be sufficient to blanch the leaves. 
Cress and Mustard are very easily grown and make a very delicate salad. 
Sow a little every ten days on very fine soil, giving plenty of water. The 
mustard should be sown a week later than the cress, as it grows much quicker. 
Radishes.—Make fortnightly sowings of these, either in drills 6 inches. 
apart or broadcast. In either case, thin out the plants to 4 inches apart. They 
do not require to be transplanted. They grow rapidly and must be pulled 
young. 
Beetroot requires a very rich, deep soil. Turn it up to two spades’ depth, 
and turn plenty of manure into the bottom. Sow it in drills 2 feet apart. 
Cover the seed with about 1 inch of fine soil; and when the young plants are 
up, thin them out to 12 or 18 inches apart in the row. Bonedust is a good 
manure for beets. 
Celery requires a little more trouble than any vegetable yet mentioned. It 
wants a deep, rich, moist soil. In making the seed bed, choose a shady spot; 
give the bed a good soaking of water, and sow the seed thinly. You may tread 
it in or cover it lightly with sifted stable droppings. While the seed is growing 
get another bed ready. Cover it with 2 or 3 inches of fine manure, and dig it 
in, mixing it with 3 or 4 inches of soil. Water it well, and next day plant out 
the young seedlings 6 inches apart. See that you have other seedlings coming 
on, so as to have a regular monthly planting. Now start at your third bed, and 
open out trenches in it 1 foot.deep, 1 foot wide, and 5 feet from centre to 
centre. Cover the bottom of each trench with well-rotted manure, then give 
it a thorough watering. Take up your plants carefully from the second bed 
and plant them in the trenches 1 foot apart from each other. They will be 
about 10 inches high. Shelter them till they are rooted, and see that all side 
shoots are removed. Be careful to have the bed so arranged that the water 
will drain away from the trenches and that the manure is not in contact with 
any part of the plant but the roots. Celery has to be blanched. The blanching 
is done in the following manner :—Having kept the plants going by means of 
plenty of water and weak liquid manure until they are almost full grown, take 
off any side shoots you may see, then gather the leaves of each plant in one 
hand and tie them up. Then draw the soil in to the trenches. Do not apply 
stable manure directly to a celery crop as the stalks will probably turn et 
Therefore, plant it after some crop—say cabbage—which has been heavily 
manured. 
If stable manure is applied directly to carrots, they are liable to become 
forked. In both the above cases it is better, when the land has been previously 
manured, to use for celery a fertiliser containing 7 per cent. oF available 
phosphoric acid, 7 per cent. of potash, and 4 per cent. of nitrogen, and for 
carrots the.percentage of the same fertilisers should be 8, 10, and 3 
respectively. On damp, black soil, rich in humus, rich in nitrogen, and 
proportionately poor in potash, increase the latter by one-half, and reduce the 
nitrogen by one-half. 
As to the quantity to use, it is impossible to prescribe any fixed quantity.. 
That must be determined by the gardener himself, because there are many 
different varieties of soil, some containing more of one kind of plant food tham 
others. But approximately, the fertiliser should be supplied at the rate of 
700 Ib. per acre—that is, nearly 43 lb. per perch of 304 square yards. The: 
cost per perch will come to about 5d. 
The next thing is, how to apply the fertilisers. Nitrate of soda is prompt 
in its action, and is only applied to land which has a growing crop ready to 
make use of it. Without a crop it will rapidly leach out of the soil. It is put 
