Next to deciding when to start your garden, the most important matter
is, what to put in it. It is difficult to decide what to order for
dinner on a given day: how much more oppressive is it to order in a lump
an endless vista of dinners, so to speak! For, unless your garden is a
boundless prairie (and mine seems to me to be that when I hoe it on hot
days), you must make a selection, from the great variety of vegetables,
of those you will raise in it; and you feel rather bound to supply your
own table from your own garden, and to eat only as you have sown.
I hold that no man has a right (whatever his sex, of course) to have
a garden to his own selfish uses. He ought not to please himself, but
every man to please his neighbor. I tried to have a garden that would
give general moral satisfaction. It seemed to me that nobody could
object to potatoes (a most useful vegetable); and I began to plant them
freely. But there was a chorus of protest against them. “You don't want
to take up your ground with potatoes,” the neighbors said; “you can buy
potatoes” (the very thing I wanted to avoid doing is buying things).
“What you want is the perishable things that you cannot get fresh in
the market.”--“But what kind of perishable things?” A horticulturist of
eminence wanted me to sow lines of straw-berries and raspberries right
over where I had put my potatoes in drills. I had about five hundred
strawberry-plants in another part of my garden; but this fruit-fanatic
wanted me to turn my whole patch into vines and runners. I suppose I
could raise strawberries enough for all my neighbors; and
perhaps I ought to do it. I had a little space prepared for
melons,--muskmelons,--which I showed to an experienced friend.
“You are not going to waste your ground on muskmelons?” he asked. “They
rarely ripen in this climate thoroughly, before frost.” He had tried for
years without luck. I resolved to not go into such a foolish experiment.
But, the next day, another neighbor happened in. “Ah! I see you are
going to have melons. My family would rather give up anything else in
the garden than musk-melons,--of the nutmeg variety. They are the most
grateful things we have on the table.” So there it was. There was no
compromise: it was melons, or no melons, and somebody offended in any
case. I half resolved to plant them a little late, so that they would,
and they would n't. But I had the same difficulty about string-beans
(which I detest), and squash (which I tolerate), and parsnips, and the
whole round of green things.
I have pretty much come to the conclusion that you have got to put your
foot down in gardening. If I had actually taken counsel of my friends, I
should not have had a thing growing in the garden to-day but weeds. And
besides, while you are waiting, Nature does not wait. Her mind is made
up. She knows just what she will raise; and she has an infinite variety
of early and late. The most humiliating thing to me about a garden
is the lesson it teaches of the inferiority of man. Nature is prompt,
decided, inexhaustible. She thrusts up her plants with a vigor and
freedom that I admire; and the more worthless the plant, the more rapid
and splendid its growth. She is at it early and late, and all night;
never tiring, nor showing the least sign of exhaustion.
“Eternal gardening is the price of liberty,” is a motto that I should
put over the gateway of my garden, if I had a gate. And yet it is
not wholly true; for there is no liberty in gardening. The man who
undertakes a garden is relentlessly pursued. He felicitates himself
that, when he gets it once planted, he will have a season of rest and
of enjoyment in the sprouting and growing of his seeds. It is a green
anticipation. He has planted a seed that will keep him awake nights;
drive rest from his bones, and sleep from his pillow. Hardly is the
garden planted, when he must begin to hoe it. The weeds have sprung up
all over it in a night. They shine and wave in redundant life. The docks
have almost gone to seed; and their roots go deeper than conscience.
Talk about the London Docks!--the roots of these are like the sources of
the Aryan race. And the weeds are not all. I awake in the morning (and
a thriving garden will wake a person up two hours before he ought to
be out of bed) and think of the tomato-plants,--the leaves like fine
lace-work, owing to black bugs that skip around, and can't be caught.
Somebody ought to get up before the dew is off (why don't the dew stay
on till after a reasonable breakfast?) and sprinkle soot on the leaves.
I wonder if it is I. Soot is so much blacker than the bugs, that they
are disgusted, and go away. You can't get up too early, if you have a
garden. You must be early due yourself, if you get ahead of the bugs.
I think, that, on the whole, it would be best to sit up all night,
and sleep daytimes. Things appear to go on in the night in the garden
uncommonly. It would be less trouble to stay up than it is to get up so
early.
I have been setting out some new raspberries, two sorts,--a silver and
a gold color. How fine they will look on the table next year in a
cut-glass dish, the cream being in a ditto pitcher! I set them four
and five feet apart. I set my strawberries pretty well apart also. The
reason is, to give room for the cows to run through when they break into
the garden,--as they do sometimes. A cow needs a broader track than a
locomotive; and she generally makes one. I am sometimes astonished,
to see how big a space in, a flower-bed her foot will cover. The
raspberries are called Doolittle and Golden Cap. I don't like the name
of the first variety, and, if they do much, shall change it to Silver
Top. You never can tell what a thing named Doolittle will do. The one
in the Senate changed color, and got sour. They ripen badly,--either
mildew, or rot on the bush. They are apt to Johnsonize,--rot on the
stem. I shall watch the Doolittles.