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.