Release date is 2025-09-25

Charlene Taylor, Karin Spence and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

"How and what to grow in a kitchen garden of one acre" by Darlington and Moll is a practical gardening manual written in the late 19th century. It lays out a complete plan for designing, planting, and managing a one-acre kitchen garden, from site selection and soil preparation to tool choice, hotbeds, and crop-by-crop instructions, including small fruits. The guide emphasizes efficient layout, rotation and succession, and reliable seed selection, and it recommends specific varieties suited to home use and market quality. The opening of the guide presents an editor’s preface explaining that two prize essays were expanded and illustrated to form a thorough, practical handbook, followed by detailed instructions on how to situate a garden (near buildings, south-facing, well-drained, sheltered from north winds), enrich heavy soils with fall manuring, and plan an east–west, near-square layout with headlands, rotations, and records. A full diagram assigns rows to grapes, brambles, strawberries, asparagus, herbs, melons, peas (followed by celery), sweet corn (followed by turnips), pole beans, cucumbers and squash, tomatoes, potatoes with interplanted late cabbage, and more. The text urges ordering reliable, often northern-grown seed early, then explains building and managing hotbeds and cold frames (dimensions, manure-heated beds, temperature cues, sowing schedules), and outlines essential tools and methods for quick, thorough cultivation. It then begins crop-specific guidance—covering asparagus, beans, beets, cabbages, cauliflower, carrots, musk melons, and celery—with concise directions on spacing, succession, pest control, harvesting cues, and storage methods such as pits, frames, and cellars, plus recommended varieties for earliness, yield, and flavor. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Philadelphia: W. Atlee Burpee & Co., 1888