The spacing table everyone quotes wrong

Lettuce may be grown in rows about 12 inches apart.

In the body of the book, for a household. The table at the back gives lettuce thirty inches for horse cultivation and twelve to eighteen for hand — and it is the thirty-inch figure that gets quoted when someone wants to show that old books were wasteful. Our own calendar says fourteen inches between rows, which sits inside the 1912 hand range.

Because of their peculiar habit of germination--the elongation of the part between the root and the seed leaves, called the hypocotyl--the seed leaves or cotyledons are lifted out of the soil. A large expenditure of energy on the part of the plant is necessary to accomplish this, and the more compacted the soil and the deeper the seed is planted the more time and energy are required in accomplishing this result.

This is correct botany, correctly applied, in a book for farmers in 1912. Epigeal germination is exactly why bean depth matters more than it does for peas, and why a crusted seedbed after heavy rain can lose a whole sowing that had already germinated underground.

Instead of attempting to set the plant deeply and maintain it in an upright position, remove all except three or four of the top-most leaves about the growing point. Dig a shallow trench along the row--a trench 3 or 4 inches deep--slightly sloping from a deep point at one end to the surface of the ground at the other. Place the bare stem of the tomato and the root in this trench, with the root in the deepest portion, cover the stem throughout its length with fresh soil, and pack this firmly.

Still the standard fix for a transplant that has stretched, and still better than burying it upright, because the buried stem then sits in the warm top few inches instead of cold subsoil. Modern advice adds only that you should pinch the leaves off rather than tear them, to avoid a wound the whole stem length can rot from.

If the plants are to be trained in this way they can be set from 18 inches to 2 feet apart in the row, and about 3-1/2 to 4 feet between the rows.

Our sowing calendar gives tomatoes twenty-four inches in the row and thirty-six between, which lands inside the first figure and just under the second. That agreement is not because we took it from here — the numbers were set independently from current guidance — which makes it a reasonable check that both are describing the same plant.

The flavor of kale is improved by frost.

One line, stated as common knowledge, and the mechanism was worked out later: cold drives the plant to convert stored starch into sugars as an antifreeze, and you taste the result. Our own note on kale says the same thing with the chemistry attached.

In gathering spinach the entire plant is removed rather than merely cutting off the leaves. The larger plants are selected first, and the smaller or later ones are thus given room to develop. No thinning is required if this plan of harvesting is practiced.

A genuinely better method than the cut-and-come-again the modern packets assume, for anyone growing spinach to eat rather than to photograph. Harvesting whole plants largest-first thins the row and feeds you in the same motion.

The small saving made by the purchase of cheap or inferior seed is usually paid for a hundred times over in the lessened value of the crop.

Written about cabbage for market, and true of every crop in a home garden too, where the seed is the cheapest input and the season is the one you cannot buy more of.

The necessary land and irrigation facilities will require the initial outlay of from $10,000 to $30,000, and the running expenses are quite heavy.

From the section on Bermuda onions, and a fair warning about the book's centre of gravity. Substantial parts of it are a commercial handbook — acre yields, freight, market demand — rather than a household manual, and those parts have no bearing on a back garden beyond curiosity.