Pleasant Talk About Fruits, Flowers and Farming

by Henry Ward Beecher

ESCULENT VEGETABLES.

We mention some of the more common kinds of garden esculent vegetables, to point out the best kinds, and give some hints for their cultivation. If more vegetables were raised and eaten in the place of meat, there would be fewer diseases, and less expense for medicine than is now the case among those who eat so heartily and liberally of the fat of the land.

Beet.—The turnip-rooted blood beet should be sown for the earliest crop; the long blood beet for the late crop, and for winter use. The blood beet is the proper garden beet. The scarcity, the sugar beets (so called), white, yellow, and red, are inferior for table use. Every year we see accounts of new varieties, which are seldom mentioned a second time, while these old standard sorts hold their own from year to year. We see people running around among their neighbors for beet-seed, careless whether it is early or late, coarse fleshed or fine grained, sweet or insipid. It is just as easy and cheap to have the best seed of the best kinds, as to have refuse seed of worthless kinds. Lately, a variety introduced from France, called Bassano, has attracted attention and commendation.[11] It is early, tender, and sweet. If you attempt to raise your own seed, let only one sort stand in the garden; otherwise bees and other insects will mix them, and the purity of the variety will be

lost. We very seldom see an unmixed variety in common gardens, unless seed have been bought from good seedsmen.

The best seed is a small black seed about the size of a pin head, enveloped in a ragged, rough, two or three lobed husk. Every seeming seed planted, then, is a mere envelope of two or more seeds, and two or three plants come up, very much to the surprise of the inexperienced, for each husk. When a little advanced, they are to be thinned out to one in a place.

We prefer planting very early, and in rows eight inches apart and at about one inch distant in the row. As the plants begin to gain size they make very delicate greens; and for this purpose are to be boiled, leaf, root, and all. Continue to thin out until one is left for every six inches for full growth.

Every year a great ado is made about monstrous beets—twenty and thirty pounders. There is no objection to these giants, unless they beget an idea that size is the test of merit. For table-use, medium sized fruits and vegetables are every way preferable; a beet should never be larger than a goose-egg.

It is equally foolish to suppose that large, coarse-grained vegetables, whether potatoes, beets, parsnips, ruta bagas, or anything else, are as good for stock, though not so palatable to men. To be sure they fill up. But that which is nutriment to man is nutriment to beast; a vegetable which is rank and watery is no better for my cow than for us. It is not the bulk but the quality that measures the fitness of articles for food.

Parsnip.—This vegetable is, to those who are fond of it, very desirable, as coming in at a time when other things are failing. For, although the parsnip attains its size by autumn, yet its flavor seems to depend upon its receiving a pretty good frosting. It may be dug at open spells through the winter and early in the spring. It gives one of the

first indications of returning warmth, and its green leaves are among the first which cheer the garden. On this account it must be dug early in the spring and housed, or it will spoil by growth.