Market garden crops of every description can be grown.  The following result was obtained on a four-acre patch near Norfolk: 

“The owner stated that in September he sowed spinach on four acres.  Between Christmas and the first of March following he cut and sold the spinach at the rate of one hundred barrels to the acre, at a price ranging from two to seven dollars per barrel—­an average of $4.50 per barrel.  Early in March the four acres were set out to lettuce, setting the plants in the open air with no protection whatever, 175,000 plants on the four acres.  He shipped 450 half-barrel baskets of lettuce to the acre, at a price ranging from $2 to $2.75 per basket.

“Early in April, just before the lettuce was ready to ship, he planted snap beans between the lettuce rows; and today, June 2d, these are the finest beans we have seen this season.

“The last week in May he planted cantaloupes between the bean rows, which, when marketed in July, will make four crops from the same land in one year’s time.  The cantaloupes will be good for 250 crates to the acre, and the price will run from $1 to $1.50 per crate.  A careful investigation of these ‘facts, figures, and features’ will show that his gross sales will easily reach $2000 per acre; his net profits depend largely upon the man and the management; but they surely should not be less than $1000 clear, clean profit to the acre.”

“This is for farming done all out of doors.  No hothouse or hotbed work—­not a bit of it, with no extra expense for hotbeds, cold frames, or hothouses.”

“Intensive,” thorough tillage and care of the soil will probably pay as well here as at any point in the United States.

Apples are the principal fruit crop of the state.  There is a yearly increasing number of trees.  In one of the valley counties a seventeen-year-old orchard of 1150 trees produced an apple crop as far back as 1905 which brought the owner $10,000, another of fifty twenty-year-old trees brought $700.  Mr. H. E. Vandeman, one of the best-known horticulturists in the country, says that there is not in all North America a better place to plant orchards than in Virginia; on account of its “rich apple soil, good flavor and keeping qualities of the fruit, and nearness to the great markets of the East and Europe.”

The trees attain a fine size and live to a good old age, and produce abundantly.  In Patrick County there is a tree nine feet five inches around which has borne 110 bushels of apples at a single crop; other trees have borne even more.  One farmer in Albemarle County has received more than $15,000 for a single crop of Albemarle Pippins grown on twenty acres of land.  This pippin is considered the most delicious apple in the world.

The fig, pomegranate, and other delicate fruits flourish in the Tidewater region.

New England, from Maine to Rhode Island, is suffering from one disease—­lack of intelligent labor.  Thirty years ago the sons and daughters who, in the natural course of events, would have stayed to cultivate the home acres, left to form a part of the westward throng making for the level, untouched prairies of Illinois and Iowa.