doubt that, in many parts of the Union, it can be grown by our method at a handsome profit.

Sweet herbs. The cultivation of thyme, sage, &c., for market purposes is but little known in this country except in the vegetable gardens in the vicinity of New York. There it is practiced to an extent of perhaps sixty or seventy acres, a fair average product of which would be about $500 per acre. Like the crops of celery, spinach, or horseradish, it is grown only as a second crop-that is, it is planted in July after an early crop of peas, cabbages, beets, or onions has been sold off. The varieties used are thyme, sage, summer savory, and sweet marjoram, the former two being grown in the ratio of ten acres to one of the latter. The seed is sown in April in rich mellow soil, carefully kept clean from weeds until the plants are fit to plant out, which may be done any time that the ground is ready, from the middle of June until the end of July. As the plants are usually small and delicate, it is necessary that the ground be well fined down by harrowing and raking before planting. The distance apart, for all the varieties, is about the same, namely, twelve inches between the rows, and eight or ten inches between the plants. The lines are marked out by what is termed a "marker," which is simply a mammoth wooden rake with the teeth twelve inches from centres; having six or eight teeth, this number of lines is marked at once. This "marker" is used for many other purposes; in lining out the rows for early cabbages, for instance, every alternate line is planted, thus leaving them two feet apart, their proper distance.

In eight or ten days after the herb crop has been planted, the ground is "hoed" lightly over by a steel rake, which disturbs the surface sufficiently to destroy the crop of weeds that are just beginning to germinate; it is done in onethird of the time that it could be done with a hoe, and answers the purpose quite as well; as deep hoeing, at this early stage of planting, is perfectly useless. In ten or twelve days more the same operation is repeated with the steel rake, which usually effectually destroys all weeds, the seeds of which are near enough the surface of the ground to germinate. (We use the steel rake instead of a hoe on all our crops immediately after planting; for, as before said, deep hoeing on plants of any kind, when newly planted, is quite unnecessary; and by the steady application of this rake weeds are easily kept down, and it is great economy of labor never to allow them to get established.)

The herb crop usually covers the ground completely by the middle of September. Then every alternate line is cut out, each plant making about two "bunches." The object in cutting out the lines alternately is to give room for the remaining lines to grow. In this way, nearly twice as much is taken off the ground as if every line had been cut; and it frequently happens, on particularly rich soils, that at a second cutting every alternate line is again taken, when the remaining lines, now standing about four feet apart, will again meet. I had about an acre of thyme treated by this process, in the fall of 1864, that sold for over $2,000. But this was an exceptional case; the crop was unusually heavy, and prices, at that time, were more than double the average. As before stated, the average yield is about $500 per acre. Herbs are always a safe crop for the market gardener. They are less perishable than anything else grown; for, if there be any interruption to their sale in a green state, they can be dried, boxed, or barreled up, and sold in a dry state a year after if necessary. usual price is from $10 to $15 per 1,000 bunches, and we have always preferred to dry rather than sell for less than $10 per 1,000-experience telling us that the market will always so regulate itself as to handsomely pay for holding back the sale. The cost of getting the crop raised and marketed will average about $150 per acre, the principal expense being in tying it in bunches. But with many of our industrious German gardeners it does not cost half that, as the tying is usually done by their wives and children in the evenings, and is a pleasant as well as profitable occupation.

The

It may be supposed by some that these large receipts per acre, from market gardening, are exaggerations. I can simply say, they are not. The condition of the soil, however, in which our vegetables are grown, is such as few farmers have any conception of. One leading condition of this high state of cultivation is (where required) thorough drainage; most of my land is drained with fourinch horseshoe tile, three feet deep, the drains being only eighteen feet apart.

We use, every spring, at least seventy-five tons of well rotted manure per acre, or alternate it with 1,200 pounds of best Peruvian guano, or 2,000 pounds of crushed bone. The manuring is done only in the spring for the first crop; sufficient remains in the soil to carry through the second crop of celery, &c., successfully.

It takes about three years to bring ordinary farm land into the high state of cultivation necessary for successful market gardening.

MARKET PRODUCTS OF WEST NEW JERSEY.

BY J. S. LIPPINCOTT, HADDONFIELD, N. J.

LABOR, either of muscle or of mind, is the true source of wealth. It is not by the gains of trade, or successful speculation, that the resources of a nation are increased; but by the harmonious, unimpeded labor of every member in the business for which he is fitted, and the equitable interchange of the products of manual skill, of inventive genius, and of mental toil. Mental labor is properly included among the sources of national wealth, because, though often deemed "unproductive," it is the agency by which unskilled labor is directed aright and rendered valuable. The moral and intellectual growth of a people is also a source of wealth, adding to material gains, while it increases the ability to derive legitimate pleasure from the possession of abundance.

The foundations of our national wealth are laid upon agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and mining. Of these, agriculture is of first importance. It is that which feeds and clothes all other labor, which supplies the material to be transformed by the skill of the artist, and freights our commerce, foreign and domestic. Agricultural labor is, then, the leading and most important direct source of wealth. The skill of the mechanic may improve, the enterprise of the merchant may exchange, but the source of wealth is in the earth, and the cost and profit are alike determined by the results of agriculture. No other branch of human industry has stronger claims upon the fostering care of legislation; for not only upon its prosperity does that of the State now depend, but the future of the nation is closely bound up with its healthy and sustained progress. Upon the conservation, by the present generation, of those forces in the soil to which we owe our wealth of vegetable and animal products-upon our ability to continue, without deterioration, to produce material for food and clothing sufficient for the growing wants of a rapidly increasing people, depends, in a great measure, the future of the nation. What question of material interests is more momentous, or demands more earnest consideration, by those who would legislate for the living as well as for their posterity?

To the prosperity of agriculture we owe most of the increase in wealth, and the consequent civilization and refinement of the present age. This is so obvious, that agricultural statistics are considered by every statesman as a thermometer, indicating, most unerringly, the advance or decline of a nation's prosperity.

Hence the care taken to register these statistics by those States in which the true principles that regulate trade and productive industry are best understood. Monetary crises have originated and spread rather from ignorance of the actual state of productive industry throughout the earth than from any other cause. The value of agricultural statistics can hardly be overestimated. They form, as has been well said, "the key which is to unlock the hidden treasures of maturing nature; the chart which reveals to the husbandman and merchant the great laws of demand and supply, enabling each to work out a safe and healthy prosperity."

Though the following is mainly descriptive of the progress and products, with extended notices, of the market-gardening of Camden county, the region with which we are most familiar, the character of the agriculture of the western and southern counties of New Jersey, is therein approximately described.

All that the county of Camden (and a wide district of New Jersey) claims in superiority over the primeval forest, has been the result of unremitting labor and the teachings of recent times. Nature supplied but the crude materials of sands, and clay, and muck; the industrious and skillful farmer has wrought out the problem of existence by aid of foreign material which the neighboring city and the exhaustless "marl" beds have supplied. The soil of the district does not appear to possess the self-recuperative powers enjoyed by many regions whose loams have resulted from the decomposition of hornblende and limestone rocks. These latter, by their decay, give up to the softened material which man, by his labors and the growth of vegetation, converts into soil, a larger share of those soluble mineral ingredients which, though needful to the successful production of human food, are not largely present in the soil of lower New Jersey. Nowhere can more convincing evidence of the immense superiority of the recent improved system of farming, over that pursued by the fathers and grandfathers of the present generation, be found, than in this section of the Union. The success already attained should stimulate to renewed efforts; for it is by no means certain that the limit of improvement has been reached. A very large portion of the eastern counties of New Jersey is, moreover, in a state of nature-wild land, scarcely inferior to much of that which the energy of the West New Jersey farmer has redeemed. The same means, so successful in his hands, must render productive these now unproductive tracts; and it is a leading object of this paper to exhibit the gratifying results of thorough improved culture upon exhausted soils, that the example may be imitated by the despairing or doubting tenant of similar lands yet unimproved. In the midst of the wilderness of East New Jersey, some enterprising agriculturists have already made farms which would be pronounced models in any part of the country, and the cultivation of small fruits and garden vegetables has there been extensively and successfully prosecuted. The low swamp-lands, hitherto esteemed valuable only for their product of white cedar or cypress, (Cypressus thyoides,) the common material for fence rails, are also found capable of redemption, and, when planted with the cranberry, have proved highly remunerative. Capital, and labor are now tending largely towards this branch of cultivation.

The success which has attended sundry attempts to redeem this hitherto neglected part of the Union has been so gratifying, that it bids fair to turn the tide of emigration. Many, dissatisfied with the border semi-civilization of the west, and its privations, its extreme climate, and their general unsatisfactory experience, have returned to the east, to find in New Jersey all the advantages of a kind soil, (needing much improvement, it is true, but with fertilizing resources of ready access,) near an unsurpassed market, with a climate unequaled for mildness and salubrity anywhere in the north. To those who contemplate removal from the northeast or the northwest in search of a more genial air-to all who would learn what gratifying results may be attained on a seemingly unpropitious soil, this record of the experience of the New Jersey farmer cannot

fail to prove interesting. Its lessons may be read with advantage by farmers, whether in the east or in the west, whether contemplating removal, or content to rest upon their paternal acres depleted by the generations that have grown thereupon.

THE "PEA-SHORE" REGION.

66

The production of vegetables for the markets of Philadelphia and New York is a leading branch of New Jersey agriculture. The business is locally denominated "trucking," and those who pursue it, "truck farmers" or "truck men." These terms, though not found in "Webster unabridged," are of long-standing use; but whence their origin we have not discovered. To truck" is an obsolete and now vulgar term for bartering, but for that kind of trade common between the early settlers and the Indians, by which articles of trifling cost were exchanged for others of greater value-as trinkets, for skins and furs. As the term "garden-truck" is often used by farmers who regard the cultivation of the garden as contemptible, the word may have had kindred origin with that which describes the barter of trifles for valuable commodities. The comparison may still appear to hold good; for, from a moderate extent of well-tilled land, the skillful and early producer of market-garden vegetables, or "truck," receives large returns in substantial sums of gold or greenbacks.

The peculiar advantages, local and general, enjoyed by the eastern bank of the Delaware river to furnish to the epicurean tables of the adjoining city those delicate, early vegetables, unsurpassed in quality in any other region, as well as those heavy supplies of more common produce indispensable to the health and comfort of the masses, render this district peculiarly worthy of notice. The more favored portion of this region is located immediately upon the river bank, extending northeast to Pensaukin creek, about five miles beyond the city of Camden. From the very early opening of spring in this locality, and the success which attends the early pea culture, it is known as Pea-Shore." On this narrow strip, vegetables have been raised, with almost uniform success, several days or a week earlier than on adjoining lands more remote from the river, and larger sums have been realized from their sale than have been made by the growers located at Norfolk, Virginia, noted for its extremely early products. Here the soil is loose, warm, friable, easily drained, readily penetrated by the rays of the early spring sun, and especially protected by the influence which humidity affords in preventing the escape, by night, of the warmth received by day. The protecting agency of moisture appears to extend from one-half to three-quarters of a mile from the river, and to be modified by the wind prevailing at the time. When the wind is from the west, the later frosts of spring do not affect the river farms, while those a half mile distant may have their early vegetables seriously injured. Again, in autumn it has been observed that as long as the winds prevail from the west, passing over the river, the late crops of tomatoes do not suffer, while the entire crop half a mile distant, beyond the low hills, may be entirely destroyed. As if confirmatory of the belief that the protecting influence resides in the presence of humidity, the residents observe that nights which are perceptibly damp give promise of freedom from frost. This region is washed by the Delaware on its northwest side, and has the benefit of a spread of water from one to one and a half mile in breadth, including the low island which may be properly regarded as merely an extension of the water, as it is, in a great measure, a bog. It is thus favored by proximity to a wider expanse of water than the region above or below for many miles. The presence of considerable humidity in the atmosphere immediately over a region, by night, is now known to impede the escape of radiant heat.

This early and productive district is part of that through which the Camden and Amboy railroad passes, and which many observers regard with no very favorable impressions of New Jersey soil for agricultural purposes. An exhibit

of the products of a farm lying in this desolate region, so given over to sands and barrenness, (in the opinion of many,) may impress an agricultural mind with its value as a spot whereon to grow profitable crops of early vegetables— the very vegetables for which Philadelphians so extol their markets, and which, indeed, contribute in no small degree to render it a most desirable city for residence.

The following are some of the returns from a farm of about eighty acres, situated thus favorably-a farm which it may be well to say is valued at upwards of $25,000. We will say nothing of the crops of corn, wheat, oats, and hay, which were considerable-adequate, or nearly so, to maintain the stock of horses and cows kept upon the farm-but note only that about 5,000 baskets of tomatoes were raised thereon in one season, which returned upwards of $3,000; more than 1,000 baskets of white potatoes, producing $1,200; 1,000 baskets of peas, which sold for more than $800; and 1,000 baskets of other "truck" of various kinds, which returned $1.000-making an aggregate, independent of farm crops, of upwards of $6,000. To produce these large returns demanded energy, skill and untiring industry, upon a soil admirably adapted to these crops, and most favorably located, as we have remarked, combined with the application of a large amount of manures from the city stables, and a heavy expenditure for fertilizers of several kinds.

STATISTICS OF CAMDEN AND BURLINGTON COUNTIES, N. J.

The success which attends good farming is the best evidence that can be adduced in support of the claims of New Jersey to the possession of great agricultural advantages. Facts furnish the best reply to the many attacks that have, from time to time, been made upon the State. We have been furnished with the agricultural statistics of the counties of Camden and Burlington, by courtesy of the chief of the Census Bureau, which we append for the satisfaction of our readers who may be interested therein. The details of products, and the value of products of each township, will render these tables of greater interest to their residents, respectively.