Farm Gardening with Hints on Cheap Manuring / Quick Cash Crops and How to Grow Them

Hilling Celery, as practised by Philadelphia Market Gardeners.

Farmers in the thickly populated Eastern and Middle States, or, in fact, east of the Mississippi River, cannot grow grains nor fatten beeves with the same profit as before the opening of the great West. Dairying still returns fair profits, but there is a widespread demand for cash crops adapted to farm culture, especially where railroads furnish quick access to towns and cities.
In response to this demand, we beg to offer a short list of farm vegetables that can be grown with greater profit than grain, with hints about growing them.
There is no real line dividing the vegetables of the market garden from those of the farm garden, but it may be assumed in a somewhat arbitrary way that those which do not yield at the gross rate of $250 per acre per year will not pay for the intense culture of high-priced land, although they will pay handsome profits in broad-acred operations under horse culture.
Before offering a list of money crops to farmers we shall have a word to say in the following pages about economic manuring. Larger cash receipts and smaller cash expenditures will result in better bank balances.
Johnson & Stokes.
Philadelphia, January 1, 1898.

Everybody understands that the soil becomes impoverished by continued cropping, if no return be made in the form of manure or fertilizer. This impoverishment is sometimes real, while sometimes it is more apparent than real, owing to the exhaustion of only one or two elements of fertility.
Farmers have learned a great deal about agricultural chemistry since the introduction of artificial fertilizers. They know that while plants demand many things for their growth, there are but three elements which are in danger of being exhausted in ordinary cropping. These three things are nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash.