The Complete Writings, vol 1 | Page 7

there is my corn, two or three inches high this 18th of May, and
apparently having no fear of a frost. I was hoeing it this morning for the
first time,--it is not well usually to hoe corn until about the 18th of
May,--when Polly came out to look at the Lima beans. She seemed to
think the poles had come up beautifully. I thought they did look well:
they are a fine set of poles, large and well grown, and stand straight.
They were inexpensive, too. The cheapness came about from my
cutting them on another man's land, and he did not know it. I have not
examined this transaction in the moral light of gardening; but I know
people in this country take great liberties at the polls. Polly noticed that
the beans had not themselves come up in any proper sense, but that the
dirt had got off from them, leaving them uncovered. She thought it
would be well to sprinkle a slight layer of dirt over them; and I,
indulgently, consented. It occurred to me, when she had gone, that
beans always come up that way,--wrong end first; and that what they
wanted was light, and not dirt.

Observation. --Woman always did, from the first, make a muss in a
garden.
I inherited with my garden a large patch of raspberries. Splendid berry
the raspberry, when the strawberry has gone. This patch has grown into
such a defiant attitude, that you could not get within several feet of it.
Its stalks were enormous in size, and cast out long, prickly arms in all
directions; but the bushes were pretty much all dead. I have walked into
them a good deal with a pruning-knife; but it is very much like fighting
original sin. The variety is one that I can recommend. I think it is called
Brinckley's Orange. It is exceedingly prolific, and has enormous stalks.
The fruit is also said to be good; but that does not matter so much, as
the plant does not often bear in this region. The stalks seem to be
biennial institutions; and as they get about their growth one year, and
bear the next year, and then die, and the winters here nearly always kill
them, unless you take them into the house (which is inconvenient if you
have a family of small children), it is very difficult to induce the plant
to flower and fruit. This is the greatest objection there is to this sort of
raspberry. I think of keeping these for discipline, and setting out some
others, more hardy sorts, for fruit.

SECOND WEEK
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