Cheap plants can be bought of these latter, and also marrows and cucumbers. If the garden is a small one, it will be more economical to do this than to raise them from seed. The above are ordinary vegetables; for special ones, such as cardoons, chicory, etc., a small packet of seed will be sufficient.
There are three vegetables not usually grown, but which are most useful. They are:—
Phœnix Kale.—Will stand the most severe winter, and the more it is cut in the late winter or spring, the more it will shoot.
Seakale Beet (not Spinach Beet).—Can be cut all the autumn. It will stand an ordinary winter, and will furnish another cut in spring when vegetables are scarce. It has a broader midrib than spinach beet, is perfectly white, and is cooked like seakale. The green blade can be used as spinach.
Couve Tronchuda.—Is used much in the same way as seakale beet. Cut the lower leaves first, and use the thick fleshy leaf-stalks; when the lower leaves are done, there still remains very good cabbage on the top. Sutton calls it “rather tender,” but it is not always necessary to protect it in winter.
It will be found useful to obtain a large chart of the vegetables usually grown, and the time of sowing, planting, and cutting. This can be obtained from the Stores (Book department).
If a rough plan of the garden can be obtained, it will be of help; if not, a copy book should be bought, and on one page a rough sketch made of each plot, with the length and breadth marked upon it. This need not necessarily be drawn to scale. Upon the opposite page should be put the crop which is on the ground. Probably someone can supply information as to what crop was previously there, and when the ground was last trenched and manured. Any notes that can be made in this respect will be useful. It is a good plan to divide the garden under cultivation roughly into four quarters, disregarding, for the moment, that part which is under permanent crops, such as asparagus, rhubarb, etc. By trenching and manuring one plot every year, it can be arranged for each quarter to have a good dressing at least once every four years.
Bastard trenching is generally better than trenching; and the more constantly the ground is stirred the better.
As farmyard manure is often scarce, and labour for thorough trenching is expensive or difficult to obtain, it will be found that doing a quarter of the ground each year is a sure way of getting it all under cultivation. This, and digging in the refuse, will supply the necessary humus. Between times dig as deep as possible and use artificial manure.
The reason for ascertaining the crops that have been grown before is to enable some sort of rotation to be practised. It is impossible, in gardening, to do this as perfectly as in agriculture, but there are a few things which it is well to bear in mind. The three fundamental rules are as follows:—