PREFACE.
An intensive farm is only an enlarged garden patch.
This book is not intended as a scientific book on agriculture; there are many such books which are out of the depths of everyone except professors and professionals. In a nice experiment station, nice experiments and scientific calculations are excellent; but I want to give the plain man or woman who has a back yard or back lot, out of which he might make part of a living or more than a living, a book that will show how to do it.
I want to help the man or woman who has to do the cultivation at odd times and who finds it hard to get the time for the work, even though this work enables him to do far more work of other kinds. I have had all sorts of experience with gardening, in spite of telegrams and people who want “just five minutes for some important business.” So if you have the same trouble getting the time, do not let that discourage you. We can get health, happiness and some profit in spite of the interruptions.
It won’t be enough simply to read this book; that won’t make you a gardener; but if you study it while you are working on the land and use your judgment and common sense, in one season you will be able to teach most of those whom you now have to hire as expert Gardeners at Three Dollars a Day.
If anybody sneers at your gardening as being “book farming,” let him sneer; a fool never understands what a wise man is doing: if he did, he would do it himself. You have here the plain, simple, practical facts without scientific terms—just the ordinary garden talk. There are plenty of things you will not find in this book. You won’t find analyses of fertilizers, nor how to grow “pomatoes,” or anything else that won’t sell when you have grown it. Nor will you find fairy stories of poultry profits that make the goose’s golden eggs look like thirty cents. There is a use for all that sort of thing—it arouses interest and stimulates the imagination. But you will probably be content to be a good, practical, every-day gardener who can make things grow and knows what to do with them after they have grown.
Some critics, who will not read this book, will sagely remark that such books as Mr. Hall’s are dangerous, because they induce inexperienced persons to sell out and lose their money trying to get Liberty on Three Acres or a Living from a Little Land. To repeat for such people my cautions and advice to learn navigation before buying your ship, is to blow against the North wind.
If you have skipped the foregoing, just skip again, back to it. You will see that I have promised to use no scientific terms. This book will be read by more plain people than by scientists, and so I have aimed to talk just as I would if I were trying to teach you how to raise lettuce—or rather trying to teach you to learn for yourself how to raise lettuce. For we cannot teach anyone anything, we can only give him the opportunity of learning. So if the experimental agriculturist thinks that a good deal has been left out that might have been put in, I hope he will remember that I have had to pick from a measureless field, and by trying to crowd in too much I might easily confuse the less experienced and make it hard for him to learn.
And yet no one need think that by reading a book or any number of books he can be made a gardener. That is done by work of head and hands on the soil; and the best preparation for a really scientific use of your own land, is to hire yourself out for a while to a market gardener and get the practical, every-day experience.
You might as well expect to learn writing without using a pen as gardening without using a bit of land. You will make some mistakes and lose some crops, but I can show you how to profit by mistakes and to lose very little by losses.
If you don’t understand the directions, that is my fault: I should be able to make it clear to everyone. So just write me (a pencil and a postal card will do) and I will tell you what you want to know, if I know it myself or can find out.
Bolton Hall.
56 Pine St., New York City.