Farm Gardening with Hints on Cheap Manuring Quick Cash Crops and How to Grow Them — A Closer Reading

Economic Manuring and Soil Chemistry

The opening chapter, “Making the Soil Rich,” tackles the farmer’s core expense: fertilizer. The authors distinguish between real and apparent soil exhaustion, noting that only three elements—nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash—are typically depleted by ordinary cropping. They caution that lime is not a true fertilizer but can “break up combinations already existing in the soil” to release insoluble plant food. This distinction reflects an awareness of recent advances in agricultural chemistry since the introduction of artificial fertilizers. The advice is tempered by experience: lime sometimes produces “almost marvelous results; at other times no visible effects whatever.” The emphasis on cheap manuring aligns with the book’s subtitle and its goal of reducing cash expenditures while increasing receipts.

Tomato Culture and Market Realities

The tomato receives detailed treatment, reflecting its status as a prime cash crop. The authors recommend specific varieties for different seasons: Atlantic Prize and Money Maker for earliest, Brinton’s Best and New Fortune for main crop, and Brandywine, Cumberland Red, and Stone for late. They advise successional planting—setting out plants in mid-May and sowing seed directly in the ground later—because “young, vigorous plants yield the most and best fruit.” The ideal market tomato is described with precision: “medium size and smooth shape,” firm, deep, ripening evenly, with no greenness or wrinkles around the calyx. Color preference is left to local markets, some demanding red, some purple. The book also addresses diseases like blight, which it suspects is “encouraged, if not wholly caused by too early planting in cold ground,” and recommends Bordeaux mixture as a preventive.

Horse Culture vs. Intensive Gardening

A key distinction runs through the guide: the authors assume farm gardens will use horse-drawn equipment rather than hand labor. They state that vegetables yielding less than $250 per acre per year will not pay for “the intense culture of high-priced land,” but will still return “handsome profits in broad-acred operations under horse culture.” This frames the book’s audience—farmers with land, not market gardeners with small plots. The tomato chapter reinforces this: in open field culture, the tomato “is always allowed to lie upon the ground,” whereas in garden culture it is staked or trellised. The recommended spacing of 4 feet each way (about 2,700 plants per acre) suits horse cultivation. Even the advice on prolonging the season by picking unripe fruit at first frost and ripening it in a cold frame assumes access to sashes and straw, not glasshouses.

Readers should note that this is a commercial publication from seed merchants, so variety recommendations and product descriptions (referenced to “Johnson & Stokes’ Garden and Farm Manual”) serve a dual purpose. The book’s value lies in its snapshot of late-nineteenth-century market farming: the crops, the economics, and the practical chemistry. The excerpts show a clear-eyed focus on profit margins, soil management, and regional adaptation, making it a useful primary source for agricultural history.

This old seed catalog made me think of my grandfather’s ledger—neat columns of melons and early cabbage, all measured against the weather’s whim. There’s a plain honesty there, the same rooted wonder I once felt reading Peter Parley's Wonders of the Earth, Sea, and Sky — A Closer Reading, which treated the natural world as a familiar, patient acquaintance. Both whisper that small, careful attentions are their own quiet harvest.