Golden Gate Gardening

Cover of Premium Schedule, Vertical Files

SF-Associations-Agricultural Society. Courtesy

of the San Francisco History Center, SFPL.

Hungering for more vegetable fodder after attending this afternoon's talk by Pam Peirce,  author of the newly-revised Golden Gate Gardening? Come upstairs to the San Francisco History Center to peruse the premium (i.e. prize money) schedule for the First Annual Exhibition by the San Francisco Bay District Agricultural Society, held Oct. 4-11,1860. Among its fourteen classes of competition are "Class V. Farm and Garden Product Department" and "Class IX. Department of Husbandry." Under the former, you'll find "No. 71-Garden Vegetables," which includes awards for "Best Onions white, red, and yellow;" "Best Turnips, Ruta Baga, yellow, and flat;" and "Best Beets, turnip, sugar, and Mangel Wurtzel." Under the latter, you'll find "No. 97-Farms, Orchards, &c.," which includes gardens as a whole rather than vegetables individually.  Interestingly, Garden Vegetable winners are awarded diplomas rather than cash, but Best Vegetable Garden gets $10, paid in "plate or money."

Items like this premium schedule, otherwise known as ephemera (materials printed for specific, limited use, and generally intended to be discarded) are being cataloged as part of the California Ephemera Project, a collaborative project between the California Historical Society, the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library, the Society of California Pioneers, and the GLBT Historical Society. For more information, please follow the project's blog, 36 Pages or Less.