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Gardening for Young and Old; The Cultivation of Garden Vegetables in the Farm Garden
Gardening for Young and Old The Cultivation of Garden Vegetables in the Farm Garden Author:Joseph Harris General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1883 Original Publisher: Orange Judd Company Subjects: Vegetable gardening Gardening Flower gardening Gardening / General Gardening / Flowers / General Gardening / Garden Design Gardening / Regional / General Gardening / Techniques Gardening / Vegetables ... more »Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: MAKING THE HOT-BED. Whether plants are or are not started in boxes in the house, a hot-bed will be found very useful. If possible this should be placed where a hedge, a fence, or building breaks the force of the wind, admitting at the same time the full rays of the sun. A large quantity of manure is not necessary. The hot-bed should be covered with five or six inches of light, well prepared soil, and moss or leaf-mould, or dryed and sifted muck, or a compost of rotted sods, etc., as previously described. There are two methods of making a hot-bed. One is to stack fermenting manure on the surface, taking care to build it up regularly and solidly, distributing the long and short manure evenly. Add the manure in layers of about six inches, beating each one down with the fork. The pile should be two or two and a half feet high, with square solid sides, and should be two feet wider and longer than the frame of the hot-bed, as the center is hotter than the outside, which is exposed to the cold air. Another method, and one economical of manure, is to dig a pit two feet wider and longer than the frame. The manure is carefully placed in this excavation, being trodden down evenly and solidly. The management of the hot-bed requires some experience, especially in regard to ventilation and the degree of heat needed by different classes of plants. Cabbage, cauli...« less