CRESSES.
The pungent watery juice of the cress group, and their cross-bearing flowers at time of bloom, prove that the Mustard Family embraces them all. There is a strong family likeness, especially when one nibbles first one and then another of these related plants.
The leaves of cresses are the principal edible parts, though tender stems are good, too. They are eaten as a salad or minced in soup, or merely garnish meats on the platters. "Small salads" are made of the first or seed leaves of newly sown cress, or white mustard. Frequent sowings keep up the supply throughout the season.
Water cress is a most wholesome and delicate salad plant. It is best raised in a clear, small, running brook. Next best is the margin of a pond. Last, it grows in ordinary garden soil, if it be kept moist through good culture, and freely treated to water.
Along roadsides one often sees brooks choked with a luxuriant growth of cress. The tempta tion to gather a lot of it is almost irresistible. The only question is: "Is the water polluted with sewage?" Typhoid fever is certainly carried by water cress from impure streams. So we usually drive on, if we are well-informed as to the danger.
To get cresses started in our own brook we must sow the seed in a box, and as the little plants come on, transplant them into the sand where the flow is scarcely perceptible, and the water barely covers the sand. When they are established
thin them by taking up and throwing into deeper water, the ones the thinning removes. They will catch root and multiply.
Another way is to buy a bunch of water cress, take out the fresh, new shoots and plant them, as we would young ones from the seedbox. It is but a short time until they take to root and become established. Then cutting merely makes more luxurious growth, till winter stops it. Indeed, the way to keep cress from freezing is to flood the bed, so that ice roofs it. Next spring the supply will be as abundant as ever.
When old plants begin to fail they should be pulled out and a new bed started. There is nothing quite so good with roast fowls as plenty of fresh, tender cress.
Garden cress has long been in cultivation from Portugal to India. In every country it has a distinct common name. It grows as easily as weeds in the gardens of rich and poor alike. Any soil, any season, suits it. Abuse does not keep it from abundant growth. And it is as wholesome a salad, when picked in the tender stage, as one can find.