I have just come back now with the closing in of autumn--to the city. I
have hung up my hoe in my study; my spade is put away behind the piano.
I have with me seven pounds of Paris Green that I had over. Anybody who
wants it may have it. I didn’t like to bury it for fear of its poisoning
the ground. I didn’t like to throw it away for fear of its destroying
cattle. I was afraid to leave it in my summer place for fear that it
might poison the tramps who generally break in in November. I have it
with me now. I move it from room to room, as I hate to turn my back upon
it. Anybody who wants it, I repeat, can have it.
I should like also to give away, either to the Red Cross or to anything
else, ten packets of radish seed (the early curled variety, I think),
fifteen packets of cucumber seed (the long succulent variety, I
believe it says), and twenty packets of onion seed (the Yellow Danvers,
distinguished, I understand, for its edible flavour and its nutritious
properties). It is not likely that I shall ever, on this side of the
grave, plant onion seed again. All these things I have with me. My
vegetables are to come after me by freight. They are booked from Simcoe
County to Montreal; at present they are, I believe, passing through
Schenectady. But they will arrive later all right. They were seen going
through Detroit last week, moving west. It is the first time that I
ever sent anything by freight anywhere. I never understood before the
wonderful organization of the railroads. But they tell me that there is
a bad congestion of freight down South this month. If my vegetables get
tangled up in that there is no telling when they will arrive.
In other words, I am one of the legion of men--quiet, determined,
resolute men--who went out last spring to plant the land, and who are
now back.
With me--and I am sure that I speak for all the others as well--it was
not a question of mere pleasure; it was no love of gardening for its
own sake that inspired us. It was a plain national duty. What we said to
ourselves was: “This war has got to stop. The men in the trenches thus
far have failed to stop it. Now let _us_ try. The whole thing,” we
argued, “is a plain matter of food production.”
“If we raise enough food the Germans are bound to starve. Very good. Let
us kill them.”
I suppose there was never a more grimly determined set of men went out
from the cities than those who went out last May, as I did, to conquer
the food problem. I don’t mean to say that each and every one of us
actually left the city. But we all “went forth” in the metaphorical
sense. Some of the men cultivated back gardens; others took vacant lots;
some went out into the suburbs; and others, like myself, went right out
into the country.
We are now back. Each of us has with him his Paris Green, his hoe and
the rest of his radish seed.
The time has, therefore, come for a plain, clear statement of our
experience. We have, as everybody knows, failed. We have been beaten
hack all along the line. Our potatoes are buried in a jungle of autumn
burdocks. Our radishes stand seven feet high, uneatable. Our tomatoes,
when last seen, were greener than they were at the beginning of August,
and getting greener every week. Our celery looked as delicate as a
maidenhair fern. Our Indian corn was nine feet high with a tall feathery
spike on top of that, but no sign of anything eatable about it from top
to bottom.
I look back with a sigh of regret at those bright, early days in April
when we were all buying hoes, and talking soil and waiting for the snow
to be off the ground. The street cars, as we went up and down to
our offices, were a busy babel of garden talk. There was a sort of
farmer-like geniality in the air. One spoke freely to strangers. Every
man with a hoe was a friend. Men chewed straws in their offices, and
kept looking out of windows to pretend to themselves that they were
afraid it might blow up rain. “Got your tomatoes in?” one man would ask
another as they went up in the elevator. “Yes, I got mine in yesterday,”
the other would answer, “But I’m just a little afraid that this east
wind may blow up a little frost. What we need now is growing weather.”
And the two men would drift off together from the elevator door along
the corridor, their heads together in friendly colloquy.
I have always regarded a lawyer as a man without a soul. There is one
who lives next door to me to whom I have not spoken in five years. Yet
when I saw him one day last spring heading for the suburbs in a pair of
old trousers with a hoe in one hand and a box of celery plants in the
other I felt that I loved the man. I used to think that stock-brokers
were mere sordid calculating machines. Now that I have seen whole firms
of them busy at the hoe, wearing old trousers that reached to their
armpits and were tied about the waist with a polka dot necktie, I know
that they are men. I know that there are warm hearts beating behind
those trousers.
Old trousers, I say. Where on earth did they all come from in such a
sudden fashion last spring? Everybody had them. Who would suspect that
a man drawing a salary of ten thousand a year was keeping in reserve a
pair of pepper-and-salt breeches, four sizes too large for him, just
in case a war should break out against Germany! Talk of German
mobilization! I doubt whether the organizing power was all on their side
after all. At any rate it is estimated that fifty thousand pairs of old
trousers were mobilized in Montreal in one week.
But perhaps it was not a case of mobilization, or deliberate
preparedness. It was rather an illustration of the primitive instinct
that is in all of us and that will out in “war time.” Any man worth the
name would wear old breeches all the time if the world would let him.
Any man will wind a polka dot tie round his waist in preference to
wearing patent braces. The makers of the ties know this. That is
why they make the tie four feet long. And in the same way if any
manufacturer of hats will put on the market an old fedora, with a limp
rim and a mark where the ribbon used to be but is not--a hat guaranteed
to be six years old, well weathered, well rained on, and certified
to have been walked over by a herd of cattle--that man will make and
deserve a fortune.
These at least were the fashions of last May. Alas, where are they now?
The men that wore them have relapsed again into tailor-made tweeds. They
have put on hard new hats. They are shining their boots again. They are
shaving again, not merely on Saturday night, but every day. They are
sinking back into civilization.
Yet those were bright times and I cannot forbear to linger on them.
Nor the least pleasant feature was our rediscovery of the morning. My
neighbour on the right was always up at five. My neighbour on the
left was out and about by four. With the earliest light of day, little
columns of smoke rose along our street from the kitchen ranges where
our wives were making coffee for us before the servants got up. By six
o’clock the street was alive and busy with friendly salutations. The
milkman seemed a late comer, a poor, sluggish fellow who failed to
appreciate the early hours of the day. A man, we found, might live
through quite a little Iliad of adventure before going to his nine
o’clock office.
“How will you possibly get time to put in a garden?” I asked of one of
my neighbours during this glad period of early spring before I left for
the country. “Time!” he exclaimed. “Why, my dear fellow, I don’t have to
be down at the warehouse till eight-thirty.”
Later in the summer I saw the wreck of his garden, choked with
weeds. “Your garden,” I said, “is in poor shape.” “Garden!” he said
indignantly. “How on earth can I find time for a garden? Do you realize
that I have to be down at the warehouse at eight-thirty?”
When I look back to our bright beginnings our failure seems hard indeed
to understand. It is only when I survey the whole garden movement in
melancholy retrospect that I am able to see some of the reasons for it.
The principal one, I think, is the question of the season. It appears
that the right time to begin gardening is last year. For many things it
is well to begin the year before last. For good results one must begin
even sooner. Here, for example, are the directions, as I interpret
them, for growing asparagus. Having secured a suitable piece of ground,
preferably a deep friable loam rich in nitrogen, go out three years ago
and plough or dig deeply. Remain a year inactive, thinking. Two years
ago pulverize the soil thoroughly. Wait a year. As soon as last year
comes set out the young shoots. Then spend a quiet winter doing nothing.
The asparagus will then be ready to work at _this_ year.
This is the rock on which we were wrecked. Few of us were men of
sufficient means to spend several years in quiet thought waiting to
begin gardening. Yet that is, it seems, the only way to begin. Asparagus
demands a preparation of four years. To fit oneself to grow strawberries
requires three years. Even for such humble things as peas, beans, and
lettuce the instructions inevitably read, “plough the soil deeply in the
preceeding autumn.” This sets up a dilemma. _Which_ is the preceeding
autumn? If a man begins gardening in the spring he is too late for last
autumn and too early for this. On the other hand if he begins in the
autumn he is again too late; he has missed this summer’s crop. It is,
therefore, ridiculous to begin in the autumn and impossible to begin in
the spring.
This was our first difficulty. But the second arose from the question
of the soil itself. All the books and instructions insist that the
selection of the soil is the most important part of gardening. No doubt
it is. But, if a man has already selected his own backyard before he
opens the book, what remedy is there? All the books lay stress on the
need of “a deep, friable loam full of nitrogen.” This I have never seen.
My own plot of land I found on examination to contain nothing but earth.
I could see no trace of nitrogen. I do not deny the existence of loam.
There may be such a thing. But I am admitting now in all humility of
mind that I don’t know what loam is. Last spring my fellow gardeners and
I all talked freely of the desirability of “a loam.” My own opinion is
that none of them had any clearer ideas about it than I had. Speaking
from experience, I should say that the only soils are earth, mud and
dirt. There are no others.
But I leave out the soil. In any case we were mostly forced to disregard
it. Perhaps a more fruitful source of failure even than the lack of loam
was the attempt to apply calculation and mathematics to gardening. Thus,
if one cabbage will grow in one square foot of ground, how many cabbages
will grow in ten square feet of ground? Ten? Not at all. The answer is
_one_. You will find as a matter of practical experience that however
many cabbages you plant in a garden plot there will be only _one_ that
will really grow. This you will presently come to speak of as _the
_cabbage. Beside it all the others (till the caterpillars finally finish
their existence) will look but poor, lean things. But _the_ cabbage will
be a source of pride and an object of display to visitors; in fact it
would ultimately have grown to be a _real_ cabbage, such as you buy for
ten cents at any market, were it not that you inevitably cut it and eat
it when it is still only half-grown.
This always happens to the one cabbage that is of decent size, and to
the one tomato that shows signs of turning red (it is really a feeble
green-pink), and to the only melon that might have lived to ripen. They
get eaten. No one but a practised professional gardener can live and
sleep beside a melon three-quarters ripe and a cabbage two-thirds grown
without going out and tearing it off the stem.
Even at that it is not a bad plan to eat the stuff while you can. The
most peculiar thing about gardening is that all of a sudden everything
is too old to eat. Radishes change over night from delicate young shoots
not large enough to put on the table into huge plants seven feet high
with a root like an Irish shillelagh. If you take your eyes off a
lettuce bed for a week the lettuces, not ready to eat when you last
looked at them, have changed into a tall jungle of hollyhocks. Green
peas are only really green for about two hours. Before that they are
young peas; after that they are old peas. Cucumbers are the worst case
of all. They change overnight, from delicate little bulbs obviously too
slight and dainty to pick, to old cases of yellow leather filled with
seeds.
If I were ever to garden again, a thing which is out of the bounds of
possibility, I should wait until a certain day and hour when all the
plants were ripe, and then go out with a gun and shoot them all dead, so
that they could grow no more.
But calculation, I repeat, is the bane of gardening. I knew, among our
group of food producers, a party of young engineers, college men,
who took an empty farm north of the city as the scene of their summer
operations. They took their coats off and applied college methods. They
ran out, first, a base line AB, and measured off from it lateral
spurs MN, OP, QR, and so on. From these they took side angles with a
theodolite so as to get the edges of each of the separate plots of
their land absolutely correct. I saw them working at it all through one
Saturday afternoon in May. They talked as they did it of the peculiar
ignorance of the so-called practical farmer. He never--so they
agreed--uses his head. He never--I think I have their phrase
correct--stops to think. In laying out his ground for use, it never
occurs to him to try to get the maximum result from a given space. If
a farmer would only realize that the contents of a circle represent the
maximum of space enclosable in a given perimeter, and that a circle is
merely a function of its own radius, what a lot of time he would save.
These young men that I speak of laid out their field engineer-fashion
with little white posts at even distances. They made a blueprint of the
whole thing as they planted it. Every corner of it was charted out. The
yield was calculated to a nicety. They had allowed for the fact that
some of the stuff might fail to grow by introducing what they called “a
coefficient of error.” By means of this and by reducing the variation of
autumn prices to a mathematical curve, those men not only knew already
in the middle of May the exact yield of their farm to within half a
bushel (they allowed, they said, a variation of half a bushel per fifty
acres), but they knew beforehand within a few cents the market value
that they would receive. The figures, as I remember them, were simply
amazing. It seemed incredible that fifty acres could produce so much.
Yet there were the plain facts in front of one, calculated out. The
thing amounted practically to a revolution in farming. At least it ought
to have. And it would have if those young men had come again to hoe
their field. But it turned out, most unfortunately, that they were busy.
To their great regret they were too busy to come. They had been working
under a free-and-easy arrangement. Each man was to give what time he
could every Saturday. It was left to every man’s honour to do what he
could. There was no compulsion. Each man trusted the others to be there.
In fact the thing was not only an experiment in food production, it was
also a new departure in social co-operation. The first Saturday that
those young men worked there were, so I have been told, seventy-five of
them driving in white stakes and running lines. The next Saturday there
were fifteen of them planting potatoes. The rest were busy. The week
after that there was one man hoeing weeds. After that silence fell upon
the deserted garden, broken only by the cry of the chick-a-dee and the
choo-choo feeding on the waving heads of the thistles.
But I have indicated only two or three of the ways of failing at food
production. There are ever so many more. What amazes me, in returning
to the city, is to find the enormous quantities of produce of all sorts
offered for sale in the markets. It is an odd thing that last spring,
by a queer oversight, we never thought, any of us, of this process of
increasing the supply. If every patriotic man would simply take a large
basket and go to the market every day and buy all that he could carry
away there need be no further fear of a food famine.
And, meantime, my own vegetables are on their way. They are in a soap
box with bars across the top, coming by freight. They weigh forty-six
pounds, including the box. They represent the result of four months’
arduous toil in sun, wind, and storm. Yet it is pleasant to think that I
shall be able to feed with them some poor family of refugees during the
rigour of the winter. Either that or give them to the hens. I certainly
won’t eat the rotten things myself.