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best that can be done with it. But there will probably be a good deal of
choice as to, first, exposure, and second, convenience. Other things
being equal, select a spot near at hand, easy of access. It may seem that

a difference of only a few hundred yards will mean nothing, but if one
is depending largely upon spare moments for working in and for
watching the garden--and in the growing of many vegetables the latter
is almost as important as the former--this matter of convenient access
will be of much greater importance than is likely to be at first
recognized. Not until you have had to make a dozen time-wasting trips
for forgotten seeds or tools, or gotten your feet soaking wet by going
out through the dew-drenched grass, will you realize fully what this
may mean.
EXPOSURE
But the thing of first importance to consider in picking out the spot that
is to yield you happiness and delicious vegetables all summer, or even
for many years, is the exposure. Pick out the "earliest" spot you can
find--a plot sloping a little to the south or east, that seems to catch
sunshine early and hold it late, and that seems to be out of the direct
path of the chilling north and northeast winds. If a building, or even an
old fence, protects it from this direction, your garden will be helped
along wonderfully, for an early start is a great big factor toward success.
If it is not already protected, a board fence, or a hedge of some
low-growing shrubs or young evergreens, will add very greatly to its
usefulness. The importance of having such a protection or shelter is
altogether underestimated by the amateur.
THE SOIL
The chances are that you will not find a spot of ideal garden soil ready
for use anywhere upon your place. But all except the very worst of soils
can be brought up to a very high degree of productiveness-- especially
such small areas as home vegetable gardens require. Large tracts of soil
that are almost pure sand, and others so heavy and mucky that for
centuries they lay uncultivated, have frequently been brought, in the
course of only a few years, to where they yield annually tremendous
crops on a commercial basis. So do not be discouraged about your soil.
Proper treatment of it is much more important, and a garden- patch of
average run-down,--or "never-brought-up" soil--will produce much
more for the energetic and careful gardener than the richest spot will

grow under average methods of cultivation.
The ideal garden soil is a "rich, sandy loam." And the fact cannot be
overemphasized that such soils usually are made, not found. Let us
analyze that description a bit, for right here we come to the first of the
four all-important factors of gardening--food. The others are cultivation,
moisture and temperature. "Rich" in the gardener's vocabulary means
full of plant food; more than that--and this is a point of vital
importance--it means full of plant food ready to be used at once, all
prepared and spread out on the garden table, or rather in it, where
growing things can at once make use of it; or what we term, in one
word, "available" plant food. Practically no soils in long- inhabited
communities remain naturally rich enough to produce big crops. They
are made rich, or kept rich, in two ways; first, by cultivation, which
helps to change the raw plant food stored in the soil into available
forms; and second, by manuring or adding plant food to the soil from
outside sources.
"Sandy" in the sense here used, means a soil containing enough
particles of sand so that water will pass through it without leaving it
pasty and sticky a few days after a rain; "light" enough, as it is called,
so that a handful, under ordinary conditions, will crumble and fall apart
readily after being pressed in the hand. It is not necessary that the soil
be sandy in appearance, but it should be friable.
"Loam: a rich, friable soil," says Webster. That hardly covers it, but it
does describe it. It is soil in which the sand and clay are in proper
proportions, so that neither greatly predominate, and usually dark in
color, from cultivation and enrichment. Such a soil, even to the
untrained eye, just naturally looks as if it would grow things. It is
remarkable how quickly the whole physical appearance of a piece of
well cultivated ground will change. An instance came under my notice
last fall in one of my fields, where a strip containing an acre had been
two years in onions, and a little piece jutting off from the middle of this
had been prepared for them just one season. The rest had not received