We have found these on light soil, with only moderate fertilizing, an unprofitable crop at four dollars, but on good land, with very heavy manuring, decidedly profitable at two dollars per bushel. Fine potatoes rarely are less than that in Jacksonville. They will be ready to dig in April and May.
PEAS
May be extraordinarily profitable, and may fail entirely. A mild winter, without severe frosts, would bring them early into market. The Christmas freeze of 1870 caught a half-acre of our peas in blossom, and killed them to the ground.
Planted in the latter part of January, both peas and potatoes are pretty sure. We have not done much with peas; but a neighbor of ours prefers them to cabbages. He gets about three dollars per bushel.
As a general summary, our friend adds,—
"For two years in succession, we have found our leading market-crops handsomely remunerative. The net returns look well compared with those of successful gardening near New York. Cabbages raised here during the fall and winter, without any protection, bear as good price as do the spring cabbages which are raised in cold-frames at the North; and early cucumbers, grown in the open air, have been worth as much to us as to Northern gardeners who have grown them in hot-beds.
"The secret of our success is an open one; but we ourselves do not yet come up to our mark, and reduce our preaching to practice. We have hardly made a good beginning in high manuring. We did not understand at first, as we now do, the difference between ordinary crops and early vegetables and fruits. Good corn may be raised on poor land at the rate of five or ten bushels to the acre; but, on a hundred acres of scantily-fertilized land, scarcely a single handsome cabbage can be grown. So with cucumbers: they will neither be early, nor fit for market, if raised on ordinary land with ordinary culture. Most of the market-gardening in Florida, so far as we know it, cannot but prove disastrous. Land-agents and visionaries hold forth that great crops may be expected from insignificant outlays; and so they decoy the credulous to their ruin. To undertake raising vegetables in Florida, with these ideas of low culture, is to embark in a leaky and surely-sinking ship. If one is unwilling to expend for manure alone upon a single acre in one year enough to buy a hundred acres of new land, let him give a wide berth to market-gardening. Such expenditures have to be met at the North; and there is no getting round it at the South.
"Yet one can economize here as one cannot at the North. The whole culture of an early vegetable-garden can go on in connection with the later crop of sugar-cane. Before our cabbages were off the ground this spring, we had our cane-rows between them; and we never before prepared the ground and planted the cane so easily. On another field we have the cane-rows eight feet apart, and tomatoes and snap-beans intervening. We have suffered much for lack of proper drainage. We have actually lost enough from water standing upon crops to have underdrained the whole enclosure. We undertook to till more acres than we could do justice to. In farming, the love of acres is the root of all evil."
So much for our friend's experiences. We consider this experiment a most valuable one for all who contemplate buying land and settling in Florida. It is an experiment in which untiring industry, patience, and economy have been brought into exercise. It has been tried on the very cheapest land in Florida, and its results are most instructive.
Market-gardening must be the immediate source of support; and therefore this experiment is exactly in point.