During the past month almost every paper, with the exception of the
agricultural journals, has installed an agricultural department,
containing short articles by Lord Northcliffe, or some one else in the
office who had an unoccupied typewriter, telling the American citizen
how to start and hold the interest of a small garden. The seed
catalogue has become the catechism of the patriot, and, if you don't
like to read the brusk, prosy directions on planting as given there,
you may find the same thing done in verse in your favorite poetry
magazine, or a special department in _The Plumbing Age_ under the
heading "The Plumber's Garden: How and When to Plant."
But all of these editorial suggestions appear to be conducted by
professionals for the benefit of the layman, which seems to me to be a
rather one-sided way of going about the thing. Obviously the
suggestions should come from a layman himself, in the nature of
warnings to others.
I am qualified to put forth such an article because of two weeks'
service in my own back yard, doing my bit for Peter Henderson and
planting all sorts of things in the ground without the slightest
expectation of ever seeing anything of any of them again. If, by any
chance, a sprout should show itself, unmistakably the result of one of
my plantings, I would be willing to be quoted as saying that Nature
_is_ wonderful. In fact, I would take it as a personal favor, and
would feel that anything that I might do in the future for Nature
would be little enough in return for the special work she went to all
the trouble of doing for me. But all of this is on condition that
something of mine grows into manhood. Otherwise, Nature can go her way
and I go mine, just as we have gone up till now.
However, although I am an amateur, I shall have to adopt, in my
writing, the tone of a professional, or I shall never get any one to
believe what I say. If, therefore, from now on I sound a bit cold and
unfriendly, you will realize that a professional agricultural writer
has to have _some_ dignity about his stuff, and that beneath my rough
exterior I am a pleasant enough sort of person to meet socially.
_Preparing the Ground for the Garden_
This is one of the most important things that the young gardener is
called upon to do. In fact, a great many young gardeners never do
anything further. Some inherited weakness, something they never
realized they had before, may crop out during this process: weak back,
tendency of shoulder-blades to ossification, misplacement of several
important vertebræ, all are apt to be discovered for the first time
during the course of one day's digging. If, on the morning following
the first attempt to prepare the ground for planting, you are able to
walk in a semi-erect position as far as the bathtub (and, without
outside assistance, lift one foot into the water), you may flatter
yourself that you are, joint for joint, in as perfect condition as
the man in the rubber-heels advertisements.
[Illustration: "If you are able to walk as far as the bathtub..."]
Authorities differ as to the best way of digging. All agree that
it is impossible to avoid walking about during the following week as
if you were impersonating an old colored waiter with the lumbago; but
there are two schools, each with its own theory, as to the less
painful method. One advocates bending over, without once raising up,
until the whole row is dug. The others, of whom I must confess that I
am one, feel that it is better to draw the body to a more or less
erect position after each shovelful. In support of this contention,
Greitz, the well-known authority on the muscles of the back, says on
page 233 of his "Untersuchungen über Sittlichkeitsdelikte und
Gesellschaftsbiologie":
"The constant tightening and relaxing of the _latissimus dorsi_
effected in raising the body as the earth is tossed aside, has a
tendency to relieve the strain by distributing it equally among the
_serratus posticus inferior_ and the corner of Thirty-fourth Street."
He then goes on to say practically what I have said above.
The necessity for work of such a strenuous nature in the mere
preliminaries of the process of planting a garden is due to the fact
that the average back-yard has, up till the present time, been
behaving less like a garden than anything else in the world. You might
think that a back-yard, possessed of an ordinary amount of decency and
civic-pride would, at some time during its career, have said to
itself:
"Now look here! I may some day be called upon to be a garden, and the
least I can do is to get myself into some sort of shape, so that, when
the time comes, I will be fairly ready to receive a seed or two."
But no! Year in and year out they have been drifting along in a fools'
paradise, accumulating stones and queer, indistinguishable cans and
things, until they were prepared to become anything, quarries,
iron-mines, notion-counters,--anything but gardens.
I have saved in a box all the things that I have dug from my
back-yard, and, when I have them assembled, all I will need will
be a good engine to make them into a pretty fairly decent
runabout,--nothing elaborate, mind you, but good enough to run the
family out in on Sunday afternoons.
And then there are lots of other things that wouldn't even fit into
the runabout. Queer-looking objects, they are; things that perhaps in
their hey-dey were rather stunning, but which have now assumed an air
of indifference, as if to say, "Oh, call me anything, old fellow,
Ice-pick, Mainspring, Cigar-lighter, anything, I don't care." I tell
you, it's enough to make a man stop and think. But there, I mustn't
get sentimental.
In preparing the soil for planting, you will need several tools.
Dynamite would be a beautiful thing to use, but it would have a
tendency to get the dirt into the front-hall and track up the stairs.
This not being practicable, there is no other way but for you to get
at it with a fork (oh, don' be silly), a spade, and a rake. If you
have an empty and detached furnace boiler, you might bring that along
to fill with the stones you will dig up. If it is a small garden, you
ought not to have to empty the boiler more than three or four times.
Any neighbor who is building a stone house will be glad to contract
with you for the stones, and those that are left over after he has got
his house built can be sold to another neighbor who is building
another stone house. Your market is limited only by the number of
neighbors who are building stone houses.
On the first day, when you find yourself confronted by a stretch of
untouched ground which is to be turned over (technical phrase, meaning
to "turn over"), you may be somewhat at a loss to know where to begin.
Such indecision is only natural, and should cause no worry on the
part of the young gardener. It is something we all have to go through
with. You may feel that it would be futile and unsystematic to go
about digging up a forkful here and a shovelful there, tossing the
earth at random, in the hope that in due time you will get the place
dug up. And so it would.
The thing to do is to decide just where you want your garden, and what
its dimensions are to be. This will have necessitated a previous
drawing up of a chart, showing just what is to be planted and where.
As this chart will be the cause of considerable hard feeling in the
family circle, usually precipitating a fist-fight over the number of
rows of onions to be set out, I will not touch on that in this
article. There are some things too intimate for even a professional
agriculturist to write of. I will say, however, that those in the
family who are standing out for onions might much better save their
time and feelings by pretending to give in, and then, later in the
day, sneaking out and slipping the sprouts in by themselves in some
spot where they will know where to find them again.
Having decided on the general plan and dimensions of the plot, gather
the family about as if for a corner-stone dedication, and then make a
rather impressive ceremony of driving in the first stake by getting
your little boy to sing the first twelve words of some patriotic air.
(If he doesn't know the first twelve, any twelve will do. The idea is
to keep the music going during the driving of the stake.)
[Illustration: "Make a rather impressive ceremony of driving the first
stake."]
The stake is to be driven at an imaginary corner of what is to be your
garden, and a string stretched to another stake at another imaginary
corner, and there you have a line along which to dig. This will be a
big comfort. You will feel that at last you have something tangible.
Now all that remains is to turn the ground over, harrow it, smooth it
up nice and neat, plant your seeds, cultivate them, thin out your
plants and pick the crops.
It may seem that I have spent most of my time in advice on preparing
the ground for planting. Such may well be the case, as that was as far
as I got. I then found a man who likes to do those things and whose
doctor has told him that he ought to be out of doors all the time. He
is an Italian, and charges really very little when you consider what
he accomplishes. Any further advice on starting and keeping up a
garden, I shall have to get him to write for you.