The very first question to be settled in considering this subject is, have you a market for your crops when they are raised? If yes, then have you a soil and location suitable for the purpose? A light sandy loam is perhaps the best of all soils for this purpose. You can raise as large crops upon a rich heavy loam, with a clay subsoil, as you can upon a light, sandy loam, and perhaps with less manure, but if you are upon a heavy loam and your competitor upon a light soil, though you may be equally good as cultivators, his soil will give him from one to two weeks the advantage in time. This, of course, not only gives him the high prices for the early crops, but it gives him the control of the market. Hence your success is impossible, though you may have equal advantages with him in every other respect.

Let me give you a single practical illustration of this. A number of years since, I planted my early cucumbers in a very favorable spot, and cultivated them to the best of my ability. The result was a very early, as well as a fine crop of them. I put the price at 37½ cents per dozen, which was low enough to drive the southern ones out of the market, and as no other gardener about town had any, I had the market entirely to myself. This lasted about ten or twelve days, when some three or four other growers brought in their first picking upon the same morning. The price fell from 37 ½ cents to nine cents that morning, and in two or three days they were not worth 25 cents per bushel. The result was, I made a nice profit upon my crop, while I think none of the other growers realized sufficient for theirs to pay for marketing them.

Another very important consideration is the location. It is far better to pay a good round price for land within one mile of the market, than to have the same kind of land given to you two miles away. For instance, some years since a young friend of mine commenced business as a gardener and a fruit grower. He was situated upon the same road that I am, but about twice the distance, or 2½ miles from the business portion of our city. He laid a out a considerable sum of money in his preparations. He was a good grower, and an honorable young man, and I hoped to see him do well. He followed the business for two or three years, but he never seemed able to find a good market for his crops, and they were almost constantly a drug upon his hands, while my crops were always sold at a fair price. At length he came to me one day and said, "I am going out of vegetable growing entirely." "Why so?" I asked. "Well," said he, "your location gives you such an advantage, that I cannot compete with you. You can be in market a little earlier than I can, and what is still worse, a merchant or his clerk will never drive by your garden and come to mine, unless you happen to be out of the things he needs.

The result is, that you control the market, and I can only get such orders as you cannot, or do not choose to fill." And this was true, though I had never by any word, or act of mine, made the least effort to crowd him out of the market. Nor is this all. The difference of only one mile in distance will make a vast difference in the team work during the year. If you have a good sized garden, say of seven or eight acres, you will probably need to average two trips per day for nearly or quite 300 days in the year. This, of course, includes the hauling of manure into your garden as well as marketing your crops. Here, then, is a difference of 1,200 miles in one year's driving. Hence, my advice is, pay a large price for land near your market, rather than take land as a gift three or four miles away.

Now we come to the business of planting and cultivation. I will take it for granted that you are provided with at least 10 cords of good manure for each acre that you propose to cultivate; and if you have 15 cords per acre, all the better. I know that some farmers will persist in farming without manure, but I am going to try and believe that no one will be so silly as to attempt gardening without a good supply of it on hand.

Before going farther, let me give one general rule for manuring, which my own experience has shown me to be the best of any that I have ever tried. It is as follows: Spread about one-half of what you design for a given portion of land upon the top of the ground and for this take the, coarsest part of the manure and plow it under. Spread the other half upon the top of the ground after plowing, drag it in with a fine tooth harrow. After this it will be necessary to rake the whole ground over with hand rakes. I lay this down not as an invariable rule, but as a general one, which of course has its exceptions.

Now comes the selection of seeds, and if there is anything more utterly bewildering to a beginner than this, I am sure that I do not know what it is. For instance, I have one volume in my library in which there are 25 varieties of onions enumerated, 34 of potatoes, 34 of squashes, 40 of beets, 42 of tomatoes, 50 of cucumbers, 54 of cabbages, 56 of turnips, 58 of corn, 84 of lettuce, 108 of beans, 115 of peas, and so on through the whole list. There is a list of twelve of our standard garden vegetables, and 700 varieties of seed to select from. Nor is this all. Not a year passes by but new varieties of each of these and many other kinds are introduced with an almost innumerable host of circulars, that would lead us to believe that we were upon the eve of some great revolution in vegetable and fruit growing.

If you attempt to introduce all the new kinds and varieties that are recommended to you, ruin is inevitable. Upon the other hand if you ignore all of them, you will soon find yourself lagging behind the age in improvements. Hence you perceive, that to make a good selection will require all of your good sense as well as your experience, and if you succeed then without making any mistakes, I have only to say that you will be more fortunate than I have ever been in this feature of the business.

I am tempted here to give you a list of a few of our most prominent vegetables that have done the best with me, though it is very possible that some of them may not be the best for all parts of the state. For early onions, the common top or bunch onions: for late or main crop, the Wethersfield, Early Red Globe and the Yellow Danvers, the first named being the most hardy and the best keepers. Tomatoes: Early crop, the Early York; for late or main crop, the Tilden and the Trophy. Early cabbage, the Jersey Wakefield; for late crop, the Bergen Drumhead, if you have a heavy soil. If a light one, the Winningstadt. Early potatoes, Early Rose; late crop, the Peerless. Corn: Crosby's Early and Stowell's Evergreen for late crop. Bush beans, the Early Valentine. Peas: First crop, the Early Kent; late, the Champion of England. For fall squash, the Turban or the Boston Marrow; for winter, the Hubbard. Cucumbers, Early Frame and White Spine. Beets: The Bassano and the Egyptian for early crop, and the Blood Turnip for late crop.

Strawberries: Wilson's Albany Seedling.

The above is of course a very limited assortment of seeds, and while they are standard varieties, I by no means confine myself to them, but am constantly experimenting with new varieties; still I would guard you against putting too much confidence in the representations of those who have new varieties to sell.

Well, we will suppose that we have our beds nicely prepared, with the alleys so made that they will not only carry all the surplus water off the beds, but so arranged that they will carry it entirely from the garden. No matter how early in the spring it is, if your ground is in good condition to work, you may begin planting, but plant only those kinds that will not be injured by the late spring frosts. The ground may be frozen an inch deep after peas and onions are up, without their being injured. Beets, parsnips, carrots, radishes, turnips, as well as some other plants, will endure an ordinary spring frost without injury, while beans, tomatoes, egg plant, melons, cucumbers, sweet potatoes and some others, are very sensitive to cold, and will sometimes become so chilled by the cold air without any frost, that they will never entirely recover from it.

Putting the seeds in the ground is a small job, compared with what it was years ago. A good boy, 15 or 16 years old, with a good Harrington or Comstock seed sower, will sow an acre of ground in a day with the small seeds, and will do the work better than twenty men will do the same work by hand. Upon my light soil I sow the small seeds about an inch in depth, and of onion seed from 3½ to 4 pounds per acre; the rows 14 inches apart; early carrots and radishes, 12 inches; beets, 16 inches; parsnips, 18 inches between the rows, and with all of them we regulate the machine so that it will drop from one to two seeds per inch in the rows, as you will find it much easier to destroy some of the young plants, than to fill the vacancies if there are not enough. Peas should be among the first of seeds in the ground. The same may be said of onions, not only for the early ones, but for the late or main crop. With regard to this crop, there arc three things that are absolute necessities; and 1 have never yet seen what 1 call a good crop of onions where either of the three had been neglected.

The first of these is very rich ground, the second is to get them in very early, so that they may have the cool, damp weather of spring to get started; the last requisite is thorough cultivation, and this, too, at the right time. I consider the onion crop about as sure as any crop I raise, if the conditions necessary for a good crop are complied with, but if they are not, complete failure is an almost absolute certainty. By the time these hardy, and half hardy crops are in the ground, it will be late enough to plant early potatoes and put out your early cabbage, for I am taking it for granted that you have a good set of hot - beds, or else, what is still better, a hot-house, where you have been getting a fine lot of cabbage, cauliflower and tomato plants, as well as other things, ready for the open ground as soon as the season will permit. And here let me say, that when your cabbage does not head well, four-fifths of the time, it is simply because the soil is not strong enough to bring forward a full crop. It is possible to make a piece of land too rich for potatoes, but I have never seen a crop of cabbages injured in that way, and never expect to. Hence, don't spare the manure upon your cabbage ground.

Tomatoes, egg-plant, peppers and sweet potatoes should not be put out until the ground has become warm and the spring frosts are over.