Ten years' experience in raising carrots and cabbage by H. A. Cook

Ten years' experience in raising carrots and cabbage by H. A. Cook is a practical agricultural pamphlet written in the mid-19th century. It guides small farmers and gardeners toward efficient, low-cost methods for cultivating, harvesting, storing, and marketing carrots and cabbages, with advice on seed selection, soil preparation, cultivation tools, and simple on-farm management. The text opens with carrots: choose loose, even loam; plow and manure in fall; rotate; use fresh “long orange” seed. Pre-soak and warm the seed to hasten sprouting, mark straight rows with a homemade dray, and sow by hand through a horn; roll the ground after. Start cultivation as soon as rows show, working deeply with a three-tooth cultivator, then hoe sharply and weed promptly (never on wet soil), stopping horse work once roots reach finger size. Harvest by mowing tops, deep-plowing twice to roll roots out, raking them up, heaping to “sweat” dry, and then storing in bins or pits; carrots are praised as superior feed and kitchen fare, and instructions are given for raising, cleaning, and selecting fresh green seed. For cabbage, select varieties by climate, start plants in a cold frame, and transplant on dry ground using a muck–plaster–ash dip that prevents wilt and speeds recovery; plant in straight lines, cultivate deeply, and promote tight heads with repeated light dressings of a salt–plaster mix; control lice with sifted ashes or soot; harvest late, pull with a crotched stick, and store by trenching loose heads or keeping rooted heads in cellar soil. Brief closing sections argue that five well-manured acres of carrots and cabbage can be highly profitable, explain how to make ample manure with muck and yard waste, offer folk weather signs for planning fieldwork, and end with an advertisement for the author’s spring whiffletree and ox spring. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Read or download for free

For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide

Reading Options Url Size
Read now! https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77128.html.images 87 kB
EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77128.epub3.images 350 kB
EPUB (older E-readers) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77128.epub.images 349 kB
EPUB (no images, older E-readers) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77128.epub.noimages 255 kB
Kindle https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77128.kf8.images 657 kB
older Kindles https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77128.kindle.images 644 kB
Plain Text UTF-8 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77128.txt.utf-8 72 kB
Download HTML (zip) https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77128/pg77128-h.zip 680 kB
There may be more files related to this item.

About this eBook

Author Cook, H. A. (Henry A.), 1833-1906
LoC No. 11025641
Title Ten years' experience in raising carrots and cabbage
Alternate Title 10 years' experience in raising carrots and cabbage
Original Publication New York: Brown and Hewitt, Printers, 1866.
Credits Charlene Taylor, Matthew Everett and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Language English
LoC Class SB: Agriculture: Plant culture
Subject Cabbage
Subject Carrots
Category Text
EBook-No. 77128
Release Date
Copyright Status Public domain in the USA.
Downloads 205 downloads in the last 30 days.
Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free!