. Cyclopedia of American horticulture, comprising suggestions for cultivation of horticultural plants, descriptions of the species of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and ornamental plants sold in the United States and Canada, together with geographical and biographical sketches. Gardening. 202 CABBAGE CACALIA seed that this or any other vegetable can be improved, or even its present good qualities maintained. It would seem to be an easy matter to save and use only the seed of a few of the most perfect Cabbages, for the plant is capable of enormous seed production. We have known a single plant to
. Cyclopedia of American horticulture, comprising suggestions for cultivation of horticultural plants, descriptions of the species of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and ornamental plants sold in the United States and Canada, together with geographical and biographical sketches. Gardening. 202 CABBAGE CACALIA seed that this or any other vegetable can be improved, or even its present good qualities maintained. It would seem to be an easy matter to save and use only the seed of a few of the most perfect Cabbages, for the plant is capable of enormous seed production. We have known a single plant to yield 35 ounces of seed, enough, if every seed grew, to furnish the plants for 50 acres; but it is not quite so easy as this showing would make itâfirst, because the yield mentioned is an exceptional one, and, secondly, because it is very seldom that an isolated plant yields a crop of seed. The flower of the Cabbage is sexually perfect, and I think there is no dis- covered reason why individual plants are self-impo- tent, but we have never succeeded in getting more than a very few seeds from an isolated plant, either in the open air or when enclosed in an insect-tight struc- ture of glass and cloth, in which a number of bees were confined. Again, we have repeatedly isolated the best plant of an hundred, setting the rest in a block, and the few seeds obtained from the isolated one produced plants showing more variation, and quite inferior in evenness and type, than those from the block. At least one of our popular varieties is made up of the descendants of a single isolated plant, but it is a curious fact that in the second and subsequent generations the stock was very difl'erent in type from that of the selected plant from which it was descended. The originator of one of our best varieties maintains that it is essential to the produc- tion of the best seed of that sort that seed-plants of veiy different types should be set together, and by crossing they will produce and give p
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