After Transplanting Tobacco, Use that Great Soil to Grow Vegetables, 1944

"Tobacco Beds Grow Gardens,” by F.H. Jeter, Extension Editor at N.C. State College, Raleigh, in the April 1944 issue of The Southern Planter

There is a certain ghostlike quality about a tobacco plant bed, especially in the late winter before the trees become fully leaved. Usually this bed is located in a sheltered, well-drained, fertile spot where no crop has been planted before. The owner works the soil until it is in excellent condition and he fertilizes it at the rate of about five tons of high grade fertilizer per acre. Sometimes he uses manure along with the fertilizer. When the tobacco plants have been grown and transplanted from this fertile spot, it is almost always permitted to grow up in rank weeds which produce seed to further infest the farm.

But not this year, if Johnny Lassiter, garden specialist for the Extension Service, has his way. Johnny says that each of the 700,000 acres of tobacco planted in the State requires 80 square yards of plant bed and this provides 11,550 acres of the best and most highly fertilized acres in the State available for growing vegetables. Added to this advantage is the fact that these spots are in protected places which means that the vegetables can be grown after the hot sun of mid-summer has blasted farm gardens in the more open and exposed places.