Cook-Gardeners
It used to be said by a countryman that the ideal servant would be a "cook-gardener.". You cannot know all about a vegetable till you have seen it from seed-bed to table. What cook, for example, would ever dream of trying to grow the vegetables that appear on the prize bench? You find the two combined in France; and, it seems, that the amal-
gamation is to be encouraged in England. One, at any rate, of our county agricultural stations is now organising lectures and lessons for village people in the joint arts of growing and cooking vegetables, especially early vegetables, or what the French call primeurs. Other essays towards the same ideal are being made. A cheap, practical little book is to be issued, giving instruction first in the art of growing early vegetables under cloches (which are the stand-by of the French intensive gardeners) and secondly in the sister art of cooking them when grown. The device of the French gardener is the simultaneous sowing of seeds of different sorts of vegetables under the same glass protector. They mature at different dates —the salad, for example, precedes the carrot—and by this means each patch of ground is doubly or trebly prolific. Dietetically vegetables are good and wholesome to eat in pro- portion with the speed of growth. Hence the superiority of the food grown under cloches or in frames under a semi- forcing system.
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