The garden yard

If you are only just beginning to experiment with gardening, and feel that a fresh supply of fruits and vegetables from May until Christmas would satisfy you for the first year or so, you will find a plot 100 × 200 feet quite large enough to feed your family and a little more besides. If your plot has not been used for a long time, you will have to do your plowing, if you can, the fall before you plant it. This will give the frost a chance to sweeten the soil, and it is very likely to need a good deal of sweetening. Most yard soils have become acid, and in an acid soil little will grow. It comes from the earth having been so long packed down that the air has had no chance to circulate, and fresh air sweetens your soil just as it does your house.

It is not good to put stable manure on an acid soil. What it wants is a little slaked lime or plaster, to help the sweetening process. Some scientists claim that we can find out whether or not soil is acid by the use of blue litmus paper, which you can get at any druggist’s. Open the soil to a depth of six inches and put in the litmus paper, drawing the earth close up to it. Examine it in 20 minutes, and if there is any acid present, the paper will have turned red. This test is still being experimented on.⁠[4]

If your land is in proper condition to manure, use about twenty-five heaping wagon-loads to the acre before plowing in the early spring, and then use a disc or cutaway harrow until you have made the soil as fine as dust. Then you have good planting conditions.

How much of the discontent with farming and gardening may have arisen from the old method of planting in beds, it is hard to say. But that cause for dissatisfaction no longer exists. We now plant in long rows far enough apart to allow the use of the wheel-hoe in cultivating the large and small plants alike, without having to readjust the blades. The wheel-hoe is one of the most useful of farm tools, and has done away with most of the back-breaking work of hand-weeding.

We cannot use the wheel-hoe on beds; that is why we now plant in rows. If your plot allows rows one hundred feet long, you will find one row of any vegetable enough for family use. Let them run crosswise of the slope of the ground if your patch is not level, else the rain may make channels of your seed rows. If possible, choose a southern exposure for your garden; because this gets all the sun, it will be earlier than less favored exposures. Lay out a plan of your land and work with a definite purpose. The “rule of thumb” is no more satisfactory in gardening than in carpentering.

If the slope of your land allows it, run your rows north and south, so that each row may get the sun from the east in the morning, and from the west in the afternoon. Put asparagus, rhubarb, sweet herbs and other permanent vegetables in a row at one side, so they may not interfere with the plowing of the rest of the garden.

Plant vegetables of the same height together, so far as the tillage required will allow. Put the tall ones at the back, so as not to shade the others. If you have a hedge, a building or a strip of woods as a windbreak on the side where the wind blows worst in winter, you will get vegetables a fortnight earlier in the spring, and probably a month later in the fall. The more protected the garden, the warmer the soil, and warm soil means quick and abundant returns. That is one reason why we use so much manure. It warms and quickens the soil.

Plant vegetables that ripen at the same time as near together as their size, habits and tillage requirements will permit.

Practice rotation; for instance, lima beans should not immediately follow string beans or peas. As far as possible, keep the plants subject to the same insects and diseases together. It is easier to treat them, and besides, it leaves the other portions of the plot uninfested, if they get so bad that you have to change the position of the plants.

If you are growing fruits, you could plant a row of apple trees about fifteen feet apart on the northern border, plums and pears on the west, and cherries and peaches on the east side. Then if you could put a grape-trellis next the apples, and a row of gooseberry, currant, raspberry and blackberry bushes in front of the grapevines, you will have a windbreak as a protection against the north winds, which will prove profitable in itself as well as in its service to the vegetables.

Transplant freely; nearly all vegetables are the better for it, especially lettuce and other salad plants. Sow seed thickly in the first place. You can easily thin out or transplant, but you cannot increase the number of plants if you have sown thinly. Even a small proportion of weak seed that would not sprout would seriously affect your crop. Besides, where you sow thickly, you can afford to weed out all but the best and stockiest, and you are thus doing something to improve the strain.

Keep your soil busy all the time. Dr. Watts said, “Satan finds some mischief still, for idle hands to do,” and that might be paraphrased to read that “Nature has great store of weeds in idle lands to grow.” “Weeds are the farmer’s best friend, they force him to cultivate.” But that friendship is only true where it has that effect. The farmer who lets the weeds grow either in the garden rows or in the walks and hedges, is going to find them his worst enemy. They poison and suffocate his crop, and are also regular incubators of insects and diseases. The best way to fight them is to starve them out with paying crops. Therefore, as soon as one crop begins to ripen, plant another, and then another, and so on. To grow but one crop is risky, unless you are specializing and have prepared the best possible conditions for that one crop. For a special market this is very profitable. But usually companion-cropping is best. That gives two crops in the ground at the same time, one maturing before the other needs the space. Thus late celery may be planted between the rows of early celery; lettuce with early cabbage; radishes with beets or carrots; corn with squash, pumpkins or beans, and horse-radish with early onions or cauliflower.

Irrigation for arid soils and drainage for wet or clayey soils, are the two opposite methods which bring astounding results. Any sort of drainage is better than no drainage, but the best form so far discovered is the tile drain laid about two and a half to four feet below the surface. This carries away the surplus water and prevents the roots of the crops being suffocated. On the other hand, irrigation supplies to the dry lands the moisture they need. The tremendous irrigation works carried on by the Government in the sandy, hitherto barren, reaches of the west, are bringing results even more tremendous than the works.

Hard, wet soil will not grow crops and here is where the advantage of draining comes in. Drainage deepens the subsoil and removes the water; it deepens the surface also and makes more of the plant food in the soil available. Wet soil is sticky and hard for the seeds to push their way through; but drainage will improve its texture and make it crumble and fall apart easily, or as the experts say, it will make it “friable.” At the same time it will prevent it washing or “leaching” away. But even this does not tell all of the advantages of drainage. It warms the soil and by making the ground more porous allows the roots to go deeper in search of their food and moisture. This in turn enables plants to withstand drought and hot weather better and makes returns more sure. It also permits working the ground earlier in the spring and after rains, because, the more porous the soil, the quicker it absorbs and stores moisture that comes in rain.

There are germs in the soil which change the nitrogen into nitrates, the form in which nitrogen becomes the real plant food, and drainage favors the development of these germs. You see how important good drainage is.

Get the tools you need. You cannot afford to be without implements if you are cultivating intensively. That does not mean that you must get all the advertised garden tools, or even all that your neighbor has. Although a tool may be the best of its kind, that is not reason enough for buying it. You must have a use for it on your plot. Get whatever you have a use for, and get only the best. It pays in the long run.

A list of tools and costs is given in “Three Acres,” and in “A Little Land,” so it is necessary only to note here that the spading fork is a far better tool than the spade; some gardeners never use a spade. The spading-fork is easier to use and breaks the soil much better.

The seeder, attached to the wheel-hoe, is also a saver of labor and of seed: it makes the rows quite straight, so that they are easy to keep free from weeds; it drops the seeds at even distances and if your soil is as fine as it should be, it covers them all just deep enough—provided you have learned to fix the gauges right to start on.

Combination tools, those that do several different things, sometimes work well, but they usually get out of repair quickly, and are apt to puzzle the beginner. Get the best and simplest form of the tool you want, and keep it always in condition for use. Tools that are not cleaned after use are spreaders of disease. Cleanliness prevents and cures. See to it that your cultivating tools, your harvesting baskets and bags, and your storage bins are thoroughly cleaned, and you will soon discourage the bugs. They will regard you as cold and unsympathetic, and your garden as a place to be avoided.

Don’t be afraid to use manure, both stable and green, and when you must, use commercial fertilizer. But this is expensive and is only profitable under particular crops. You won’t need it, if you keep the soil supplied with humus.

Don’t waste kitchen slops or any other waste water. It all has fertilizing qualities that will help your garden. Even in the winter it is a good plan to pour your slops on the ground, choosing a different spot each day so that no one place may get too wet and leave surface pools. Mankind in the lump is stupid, so stupid that we drain our fertilizing matter into our harbors and then dig it out again at the cost of four dollars the yard.

But you need not be so stupid as that. Even some of our cities are now learning the value of sewage, notably San Antonio, Texas. This city, with its 85,000 inhabitants, has solved the problem of what to do with its sewage, although the city fathers leased the rights to a private corporation, instead of providing for the city’s own disposal of it. This company carries the sewage six miles out of town, and has built five miles of canal, through which the surplus sewage not used in irrigating, flows upon a filter-bed where all solids are removed, and the water runs into a big basin which covers about 1000 acres. This basin being very shallow, the sun’s rays reach the bottom of it, and purify the water, so that, though it enters one end of this basin as sewage, it flows out of the other as pure water. Chemical analyses and tests have proved this many times over, and we might take a hint from this at home to “raise our darkened windows and open wide our doors, to let the blessed sunshine in.” It is the best destroyer of disease and impurity yet discovered.

The company’s acres along the line of the canal profited so much from this irrigation, that farmers soon began to purchase the irrigating sewage water for use on their forage crop fields, and for root crops particularly. The solids are spread on the surface of the lands upon which the clear, purified water is to be used, and the results have been most satisfactory. San Antonio really makes a profit out of that which is costing other cities millions every year, and in doing this has shown us another way to work, in bringing into use all lands that are available in any way for intensive cultivation.

Plenty of manure and thorough cultivation are almost a complete protection against drought. If you have plowed deep, manured thoroughly, added humus and maintained tillage, you can laugh at the drought that would once have spelled ruin for the farmer in any part of the country. You have been told this before in this very book, but that is no reason why it should not be repeated. It is of such great importance, that the average farmer would make no mistake if he had it made into a motto printed in large and striking type, and hung it where he could see it a dozen times a day. It is part of the “How to Work,” and a mighty big part, as you will learn, whether you practice it or neglect it.

Use your brains; that’s what they are for. After you get your farm started, you can get cheap and unintelligent labor, to keep it going, if you wish; but you can only reap a profit from intelligent labor, and you must furnish the intelligence yourself. Plan your work, and make the most of your soil, your climate and your market. Things that everybody grows bring low prices, but things that you alone grow, or that you grow better than your neighbors, bring good returns all the year round.

We have to learn, you know, and if we won’t learn by doing right and profiting by it, then we shall have to learn by doing wrong and suffering for it—“the way of transgressors is hard.”

If you have very little time or very little land, you will probably get the best return for your time and money by growing radishes early in the season with lettuce, followed by bush-beans or tomatoes and then sweet corn.

Put some nasturtiums in any odd space and climbing nasturtiums and morning-glories on your fence, and you will have a very creditable looking garden—big returns for little expenditures.

If you haven’t got any land, don’t let that discourage you: grow some things in a window box and learn how, so that you have learned something when you do get some land.

You can grow mushrooms in half a barrel in the cellar. The thing to do is to get started growing something.