Home Vegetable Gardening | Page 3

success will reward the efforts of your first
garden season.
And I know too, that you will find it the most entrancing game you
ever played.
Good luck to you!
CHAPTER II
WHY YOU SHOULD GARDEN
There are more reasons to-day than ever before why the owner of a
small place should have his, or her, own vegetable garden. The days of

home weaving, home cheese-making, home meat-packing, are gone.
With a thousand and one other things that used to be made or done at
home, they have left the fireside and followed the factory chimney.
These things could be turned over to machinery. The growing of
vegetables cannot be so disposed of. Garden tools have been improved,
but they are still the same old one-man affairs--doing one thing, one
row at a time. Labor is still the big factor--and that, taken in
combination with the cost of transporting and handling such perishable
stuff as garden produce, explains why the home gardener can grow his
own vegetables at less expense than he can buy them. That is a good
fact to remember.
But after all, I doubt if most of us will look at the matter only after
consulting the columns of the household ledger. The big thing, the
salient feature of home gardening is not that we may get our vegetables
ten per cent. cheaper, but that we can have them one hundred per cent.
better. Even the long-keeping sorts, like squash, potatoes and onions,
are very perceptibly more delicious right from the home garden, fresh
from the vines or the ground; but when it comes to peas, and corn, and
lettuce,--well, there is absolutely nothing to compare with the home
garden ones, gathered fresh, in the early slanting sunlight, still gemmed
with dew, still crisp and tender and juicy, ready to carry every atom of
savory quality, without loss, to the dining table. Stale, flat and
unprofitable indeed, after these have once been tasted, seem the limp,
travel-weary, dusty things that are jounced around to us in the butcher's
cart and the grocery wagon. It is not in price alone that home gardening
pays. There is another point: the market gardener has to grow the things
that give the biggest yield. He has to sacrifice quality to quantity. You
do not. One cannot buy Golden Bantam corn, or Mignonette lettuce, or
Gradus peas in most markets. They are top quality, but they do not fill
the market crate enough times to the row to pay the commercial grower.
If you cannot afford to keep a professional gardener there is only one
way to have the best vegetables--grow your own!
And this brings us to the third, and what may be the most important
reason why you should garden. It is the cheapest, healthiest, keenest
pleasure there is. Give me a sunny garden patch in the golden

springtime, when the trees are picking out their new gowns, in all the
various self-colored delicate grays and greens--strange how beautiful
they are, in the same old unchanging styles, isn't it?--give me seeds to
watch as they find the light, plants to tend as they take hold in the fine,
loose, rich soil, and you may have the other sports. And when you have
grown tired of their monotony, come back in summer to even the
smallest garden, and you will find in it, every day, a new problem to be
solved, a new campaign to be carried out, a new victory to win.
Better food, better health, better living--all these the home garden
offers you in abundance. And the price is only the price of every
worth-while thing--honest, cheerful patient work.
But enough for now of the dream garden. Put down your book. Put on
your old togs, light your pipe--some kind-hearted humanitarian should
devise for women such a kindly and comforting vice as smoking--and
let's go outdoors and look the place over, and pick out the best spot for
that garden-patch of yours.
CHAPTER III
REQUISITES OF THE HOME VEGETABLE GARDEN
In deciding upon the site for the home vegetable garden it is well to
dispose once and for all of the old idea that the garden "patch" must be
an ugly spot in the home surroundings. If thoughtfully planned,
carefully planted and thoroughly cared for, it may be made a beautiful
and harmonious feature of the general scheme, lending a touch of
comfortable homeliness that no shrubs, borders, or beds can ever
produce.
With this fact in mind we will not feel restricted to any part of the
premises merely because it is out of sight behind the barn or garage. In
the average moderate-sized place there will not be much choice as to
land. It will be necessary to take what is to be had and then do the very