“Nearly everyone in our country clings to lettuce as the only plant for a salad.  Over across the sea in old England this is not so.  Other plants are used in this way and called salad plants.  Endive is one of these.  Some of the endives are curly-leaved, and when blanched are attractive to look upon; and surely there is no reason why we should not consider the side of beauty in vegetables.

“Endive is a very hardy plant.  One-half an ounce of the seed will sow one hundred feet of drill.  Sow it as you would lettuce seed in soil which should be moist and rich.  The plants finally should be about eight inches apart in the drill.  The outer leaves should be tied over the top in order to blanch the inner ones for table use.  In the fall the plants from summer sowings may be taken up with balls of earth on the roots and placed in the coldframes ready for use through the winter.  The coldframe is a blessing.  It is a place of storage all the fall and early winter.  It is a place for early work in the late winter and first part of spring.

“Lettuce with children has always been a prime favourite for cultivation.  Before the time of Christ, lettuce was grown and served.  There is a wild lettuce from which the cultivated probably came.  There are a number of cultivated vegetables which have wild ancestors, carrots, turnips and lettuce being the most common among them.  Lettuce may be tucked into the garden almost anywhere.  It is surely one of the most decorative of vegetables.  The compact head, the green of the leaves, the beauty of symmetry—­all these are charming characteristics of lettuces.

“Not all form heads.  There is a mistaken idea abroad among children that by transplanting, any lettuce can be made to head.  Only such varieties as are called heading lettuces will head.  And these must be transplanted in order to have really good heads.  There are two general types of lettuce—­the Cos and the cabbage.  The cabbage grows more like a cabbage with great tendency toward heading.  The Cos grows longer, narrower, and has spoon-shaped leaves, which have a big, coarse midrib.  The inner leaves cling more closely together after a heading fashion; the outer leaves spread apart.  We grow in our American gardens more of the cabbage type than of the Cos.  Should we go to see our French cousins next summer, the Cos lettuce would be served to us with plenty of oil as a dressing.

“As the summer advances and as the early sowings of lettuce get old they tend to go to seed.  Don’t let them.  Pull them up.  None of us are likely to go into the seed-producing side of lettuce.  What we are interested in is the raising of tender lettuce all the season.  To have such lettuce in mid and late summer is possible only by frequent plantings of seed.  If seed is planted every ten days or two weeks all summer, you can have tender lettuce all the season.  When lettuce gets old it becomes bitter and tough.