You can have a strawberry garden on your roof or even on a balcony. This need not be costly. Clinch all the nails on the inside of a stout barrel. Bore half a dozen two-inch holes in the bottom, or put in a layer of stones, for drainage. Bore a row of eight holes about eight inches from the bottom of the barrel and about eight inches apart. Eight inches above this bore a second row of holes "staggered," and a third eight inches above those. Pile several old tomato cans with perforated bottoms one on the other in the center of the barrel: these should be the height of the barrel and placed upright in its middle. This is the conductor down which water should be poured at intervals before the soil gets quite dry. Fill the barrel with soil made of one half loam and one half well-rotted manure. Be sure the manure is not fresh. A little bone meal is a good addition.
Now plant the first row of strawberry plants ("ever-bearing" are best, though they don't ever-bear). Put each plant inside, spread the roots, and pull the leaves of each out through one of the holes. Press the soil down firmly around each root. Repeat the process for the other two rows; fill the barrel and set say six plants on the top. That will give you thirty plants, which should grow ten to twenty-five quarts of fine berries, or more. The illustration makes the holes twelve inches apart—for big leafy plants.
If there are any more, those will be you. Anyhow, you will know a lot about strawberries at the end of the season. Other things can be grown in the same way.
Better than growing vegetables, or where dry land can't be obtained, is to raise some crop like water cress that usually comes from a distance.
Often an otherwise poor season will help a specialty. One year wet weather jumped the price of mint and it sold at double prices. Hot, dry weather is required to make it produce its best.
Most of the mint produced in this country for peppermint oil is grown in Michigan. More than 4000 acres are reported from a single county. Mint oil is worth about $3.50 a pound and costs about a dollar to produce. Nice bright dried leaves sell for about 15 cent a pound.
The production of mint is sometimes as high as fifty pounds of oil to the acre. The bulk of it is grown on marshlands, which a few years ago were nowhere worth more than a few dollars an acre. The mint is sent to the manufacturers, where it is purified and made into flavoring extract or used in chewing gum, etc.
Why should we, with our infinite variety of climates, soils, and labor, import from England the coarser varieties of seeds of the cabbage family, savoy, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, or kale? We owe England enough already for the seed of Liberty we got from her. California now supplies some seed for onions, carrots, parsnips, and a few others. The finest cauliflower comes mostly from Denmark now.
Turnip seed, too, mangel-wurzel and swedes, onion, pea, bean, carrot, parsnip, radish, and beet seeds could be grown here by the same skill, care, and training as they are grown abroad.
An interesting method of forcing plants by the use of hot water baths is described in La Nature (Paris), by Henri Coupin. The process is much simpler than others now in use and may be employed by any one who has a small greenhouse, no expert treatment being necessary. Says Mr. Coupin: