In the Garden Rain has turned the colour of the
cabbage-plants from dry steel blue to deep green. The drought has meant disappointments. Look over the cauliflower-plants, for example, and see how many have the blind eye, and root them out. The percentage this year is very high. Plants of calabrese, the excellent green-sprouting broccoli that is for autumn cutting, are short, poor, and turning to seed. I am pinching out the seed-heads and hoping. A correspondent offers me plants of a Portuguese cabbage, the Quintal cabbage, which he says is excellent and which was apparently designed by nature for the communal canteen. It grows so large, says my correspondent, that he has seen specimens which a good sturdy Portuguese lad of fifteen or sixteen could hardly lift. There is still time to put in plants of this, as of cauliflowers, savoys and broccoli for spring. It is dull, perhaps, to keep emphasising this, but unfortunately it cannot be too often emphasised. Plants are cheap now ; vegetables will undoubtedly be expensive and scarce again in 5942. H. E. BATES.
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