OCR Text |
Show BIG PROFITS OF THE INTENSIVE GARDEN Skilled Culturlst Will Secure $1,000 Out of One Acre oi Land in One Year if Conditions Are Favorable. What is the real worth of a garden? gar-den? Many people incline to gardening gar-dening they feel they would love the outdoor life, and not mind the work too much if they could be sure of a decent, de-cent, comfortable living in return, writes Moray Bliss in Youth's Companion. Com-panion. We hear grumbling enough from gardeners, who are proverbial grumblers, that help is scarce, seasons sea-sons poor, prices low, and, in short, that gardening does not pay. The market seedsmen smile when you ask if one can make a thousand dollars a year if one knows how to garden. There are many men making mak-ing that sum. If we would live by gardening, we must study the ways of gardening. It was a shrewd old English farmer who used to say to his sons: "Put the horse to, and let us drive round and see what other people are after." The French market-gardeners about Paris are the most skillful growers in the world except the Chinese and the average garden of an acre or two "tilled to the eyebrows," as they say, shows the following returns, given by our consuls and business men interested inter-ested in the matter: "There are, of course, exceptions, where the total income from one acre is $6,000 a year, but as a usual thing the gardens yield but $1,500 to an acre, and the average annual profit of the gardener is not over $1,000." How many ministers and college professors and teachers and small shopkeepers, artists and literary folk glum, Germany and Holland. This simple hand-light is a frame of willow wil-low covered with glazed muslin, under which the plant grows as finely as under un-der glass. Better, in some respects, for the cotton is not so good a conductor con-ductor of heat as glass. In place of the immense quantities of stable dressing which the Paris gardener uses by the hundreds of tons to the acre, it is common now to use 4 hot-water pipes running through the Q garden beds of rich soil. Good au- thority says that 50 tons of coke will heat an acre of glass-houses the year round. Begin small, as all experts advise, with a quarter-acre, or even 2,500 feet. You can buy a lot of that size for five dollars on warm garden soil near a railway station, three hours from Boston, and learn that money is to be made by gardening at home as well as in Paris. Probably the best profit in American Amer-ican gardens is to be made from tomatoes to-matoes under high culture. That means fresh tomatoes eight months of the year, and 30 pounds at least from each vine, of large, smooth fruit, red, pink or yellow with as much variety of flavor as there is apples. - To accomplish this the seedlings are transplanted four or five times, to-make to-make them stocky and throw their force into fruiting. They are trained on trellises to catch the full sun, and when sunshine is scarce in seasons of fog and rain, it is hinted that the electric light is turned on the greenhouses green-houses with ripening effect. The In the Shelter of the Fortifications of Paris. are there making a healthy living and putting $1,000 a year in the bank besides? be-sides? The common Fench gardener makes this by intensive gardening. True, he begins with certain advantages. For generations before him his family have been gardeners, and the instinct for the best methods runs in the blood. Within a' ten-mile circuit of Paris are 2,000 market-gardens, models mod-els of care and culture, and some of which have been held by the same family for 200 years. These gardens gar-dens are not large; the largest is said to be not over four acres, common com-mon gardens are not over two acres, and not the smallest profits are taken from plats of a quarter-acre, tilled with the finest care. We need not invest in expensive field of experiment with gardens is wide as are their profits. Eden lies in every garden rightly-grown. rightly-grown. And there are few places in this country where gardening is not only possible, but profitable. A well-informed well-informed grower told me that the most money was likely to be made from market-gardens near the smaller small-er cities and towns, not in the great cities, which draw on the gardens of the world for supplies. If too far for markets, there is good work to be done raising seed in out-of-the-way places where plants will not mix. I do not know how long growers will have to pay five dollars for a hundred seed of certain choice plants, but well-grown seed, clean from weeds, will always command its price, for busy gardeners cannot bother both-er to grow their own seed. Women and children can earn pin-money in this way from the smallest plot of soil. My own first garden, six feet by ten, when I was 12 years old, was planted plant-ed chiefly to Indian corn, tended as if it were a pot plant, watered with house slop, and hoed every week. The huge amber ears it bore were instantly instant-ly begged by my father for seed, as better than anything he could get. An English laborer cultivated a quarter-acre with spade and fork, raising 15 bushels of wheat, which is the average of our wheat crop per acre. It gave enough flour for him and his wife for a year; but if he had only known enough to raise it for seed-wheat, without much more pains, he could hfive sold his crop for a hundred dollars. dol-lars. You can, if you have no better chance, raise seed from plants in pots on the top of a bay window in town, and so learn the work of tending tend-ing and enriching them for seed. Indeed, In-deed, there is a good deal of gardening garden-ing to be learned within the scope of one six-inch flower pot. Seed Frames. greenhouses of glass in steel framing, as some of our American growers now do. The clever Frenchman finds his cheap board frame, with old window-sash sufficient, and instead of thick straw mats at eight cents apiece, he uses reed mats at sixpence each, which last four years or more. The reeds grow in most of our marshes, and mat-making is a very simple and profitable trade. For hand-lights, we may take the substitute used in the gardens of Bel- |