Science in Short ChaptersWilliams, W. Mattieu (William Mattieu)
Science
Science in Short Chapters
Williams, W. Mattieu (William Mattieu)
Science
Respecting the useful or economic products I can speak with more
confidence, that being my special department in our family or home
gardening, which, as physical discipline, I have always conducted
myself, with a minimum of professional aid.
My experience of a small garden leads me to give first place to salads.
A yard square of rich soil, well managed, will yield a handsome
and delicious weekly dish of salad nearly all the year round; and,
at the same rate, seven or eight square yards will supply a daily
dish—including lettuces, endives, radishes, spring onions, mustard,
and various kinds of cress, and fancy salads, all in a state of
freshness otherwise unattainable by the Londoner. My only difficulty
has arisen from irregularity of supply. From the small area allowed
for salads, I have been over-supplied in July, August, and September,
and reduced to in-door or frame-grown mustard and cress during the
winter. With the equable insular climate obtainable under the canvas,
this difficulty will be greatly diminished; and besides this, most of
the salads are improved by partial shade, lettuces and endives more
blanched and delicate than when exposed to scorching sun, radishes less
fibrous, mustard, cress, etc., milder in flavor and more succulent.
The multitude of savory kitchen herbs that are so sadly neglected
in English cookery (especially in the food of the town artisan and
clerk), all, with scarcely an exception, demand an equable climate and
protection from our destructive spring frosts. These occupy very little
space, less even than salads, and are wanted in such small quantities
at a time, and so frequently, that the hard-worked housewife commonly
neglects them altogether, rather than fetch them from the greengrocer’s
in their exorbitantly small pennyworths. If she could step into the
back yard, and gather her parsley, sage, thyme, winter savory, mint,
marjoram, bay leaf, rosemary, etc., the dinner would become far more
savory, and the demand for the alcoholic substitutes for relishing food
proportionably diminished.
My strongest anticipations, however, lie in the direction of common
fruits—apples, pears, cherries, plums of all kinds, peaches,
nectarines, gooseberries, currants, raspberries, strawberries, etc.
The most luxuriant growth of cherries, currants, gooseberries, and
raspberries I have ever seen in any part of the world that I have
visited, is where they might be least expected, viz., Norway; not the
South of Norway merely, but more particularly in the valleys that
slope from the 500 square miles of the perpetual ice desert of the
Justedal down to the Sognefjord, latitude 61° to 61½°, considerably to
the north of the northernmost of the Shetland Islands. The cherry and
currant trees are marvelous there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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