A variety, however, called the Garden Blueberry, gives almost incredible yields, five bushels being reported from sixty plants.  It keeps all winter on the branches, if stored in a cellar, and is of fine flavor and especially good for preserves.  A little frost improves it.

But wild berries, crab apples, and elderberries and others, are good to preserve and find a ready sale if attractively put up; they also help out tile table greatly.  Then think of the fun!

In recent years, certain varieties of nuts, like the English walnut, the pecan, and the hickory nuts have been grown commercially.  In the South particularly, the pecan has been found a good crop to plant on cotton plantations which have been overworked.  In the Rural New Yorker, Mr. H. E. Vandevan gives an account of an old cotton plantation of 2250 acres Iying on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Louisiana.  The pecan tree was indigenous to the land, and the wooded portion of the plantation has thousands of giant pecan trees growing on it.  The previous owners of this plantation had done all in their power to destroy these trees, but they flourished in spite of that.  Mr. Vandevan, however, saw in the pecan a large profit, and he has planted ten thousand trees on six hundred acres, all in a solid block.  The trees are set fifty feet apart both ways, except where a roadway is left.  Between the pecan trees Mr. Vandevan has planted fig trees for early returns, with the intention of canning the fruit.

The English walnut is grown principally in California.  Its value has been recognized only recently, as all of the nut crops take a good many years before the trees begin to bear.  Nut growing on a small scale is not of much value to a man with a little bit of land, except as an additional source of income.

If you find a sweet chestnut tree or a shell-bark hickory or two in your wood lot, they will well repay protection and careful cultivation.

If you don’t, why—­there are great promises in quick maturing nut trees.  There is now an English walnut which is claimed to bear the third or even the second year after setting out.  My own small experience with these in New Jersey, however, has not been a success.

CHAPTER XIV

FLOWERS

Every city in the United States affords an opportunity for flower gardening and nurseries, but a study must be made of the market in order to know what is best to raise and where to raise it.

The choice of crops depends on the popular taste.  The flowers which are now in greatest demand are the rose, carnation, violet, and chrysanthemum.

Near every large city there are hundreds of florists with glass houses, some covering twenty acres or more.  There were over 2000 acres of flower land under glass reported at the last census.  As almost all industries to-day are specialized, so is floriculture; in one place we see ten acres of glass given over to the rose, in another thousands of dollars devoted to the carnation or the violet, while one grower in Queens, Long Island, has 75,000 square feet of glass for carnations.