The French Garden; a Diary and Manual of Intensive Cultivation

Download or read book The French Garden; a Diary and Manual of Intensive Cultivation written by C. D. McKay and published by Theclassics.Us. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ... PRACTICAL MANUAL OF FRENCH GARDENING. CHAPTER I.--FRENCH AND ENGLISH GARDENERS. Seeing that the French garden is now really coming to stay with us, a book giving full cultural directions becomes a necessity, and it is hoped that the information contained in this book will be of practical use to those who are unacquainted with the methods employed by the French gardeners who send such large quantities of the early vegetables to England. It must be well understood that large French gardens are a mistake. A small one requires such an enormous amount of indefatigable and careful labour and attention that there can be no large ones. When the idea of growing early lettuces and other vegetables in England was first advocated it was poohpoohed. Gardeners said that the climate was so different to that of Paris that we should never be able to keep any of the plants during the winter. This has now been proved to be a fallacy, and the climate in some districts of England is even better than that of Paris, and the young plants of lettuces do not " fog " off to the same extent. The last few years have been extremely bad ones for the Parisian growers, as they have lost so many of their seedling lettuce plants, whereas here none have been lost. And when one knows that in Paris there are 360,000 lights and 2,160,000 bellglasses, one can understand what an opening there is here, and that it will require many scores of French gardens to supply our wants. The French gardens sell 13,500,000 francs' worth of their early produce per year. Why cannot we, with our huge city, containing the population of a country, supply ourselves? The French grow their lettuce under small " chassis," or frames, and also a large quantity under " cloches," or bellglasses, but it...