{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","uuid":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","normalized_title":"timeconsumptionandeverydaylifepracticematerialityandculture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%2C%20Consumption%20and%20Everyday%20Life%20Practice%2C%20Materiality%20and%20Culture","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/search"},"page":{"printed_page":123,"pdf_page":124,"physical_index":124,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"1868aab560a83a27bb7e706d6056b74040a9c2fb98cbb87b9bfdc382267f760f"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"For the consumers, writing these letters was a way of sharing horticultural success, in the many different arenas in which their practices took place. Letters recounted a range of rewards, such as neighbourhood acclaim for an abundant garden; prizes for a horticultural specimen deemed the best at county or state fairs; or financial gain from prolific crops with good market value. The model of a letter of gratitude to a company, whether for a specific gift or the general worth of the product purchased, provides a means of subsuming personal pride within the broader context of corporate praise; correspondents were also not above including complaints about a specific selection that did not grow as well as others. Thus, in their correspondence with seed houses, consumers took stock at the end of the growing season, effectively marking time on the horticultural calendar.\n\nHorticultural Improvement\n\nIn the horticultural marketplace, the natural cycles of planting were augmented by cycles of commercial exchange. For both purveyors and consumers, the issue was not just one of dividing the calendar year into particular tasks, but learning how best to organize those tasks, to achieve their intertwined aims of, on the one hand, growing and selling seeds and, on the other, growing and harvesting crops from those seeds. Although at the heart of these pursuits were common agrarian acts of sowing seeds and tending plants, nineteenth-century horticulture played out against the backdrop of industrialization, bringing new approaches to the timing, ordering and sequencing of responsibilities.\n\nAs E.B. White stated a century after its maturation, the seed trade was ‘complex’. When consumers selected a particular brand, they were not necessarily purchasing seeds directly from those responsible for growing them. The companies that sold seeds to the retail and wholesale market varied in how they themselves obtained the seeds they sold. Small firms might act solely as distributors, of seeds bought from other firms or from growers, while the larger firms did grow some of their own stock, while also buying from both American and European growers. No firms grew all the seeds they sold, as, in the words of the Burpee Company, ‘this would be a physical impossibility’ (Burpee’s Select List 1889: 3). The world of the individual seed growers who supplied the retail firms was a highly localized and specialized business, differing from the state of agriculture at the time in its scale, choice of crops and modes of reaping, both crops and profits. While large-scale fields of grains were common economic endeavours by the nineteenth century, large-scale farming of vegetables, fruits and flowers did not take root until refrigerated transportation allowed for the movement of the crops, by train in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and in trucking not until the twentieth century. The seed growers, however, did plant such fields, harvesting not the produce but the seeds. Lines between producer and consumer blurred, as purveyors usually fell into both categories at once.\n\nCalendars and Clocks\n\n123","previous_page":122,"next_page":124}