Everyman's garden in wartime

Front matter

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Preface

fold, some sixty and some thirty" this book is written. Based on long experience of what has been done and can be done, it is a practical book, and the author's aim is always to convey his information in a clear, simple and practical manner. It is especially adapted for the help of the suburbanite, the man who with his own hands is cultivating a piece of land and who, for his own sake, and for the sake of all of us, wants to get the best results from his efforts.

PREFACE

HOW THE BOOK FITS THE GARDEN

Save for the parts on all-the-season matters, such as preparation of the soil, fertilizing, protection against pests, and the pocketbook advantage of raising your own vegetables, the chapters of this book are placed in chronological order, with reference to the many things to be done in a garden in the course of a year, Hsted, for the most part, under the weeks in which they best may be done.

An amplified table of contents affords suggestions as to what should be attended to in any given period and is intended to be a guide in planning, not only for the moment, but for any future time in the life of the garden. This is supplemented by the summarized calendars and for quick reference to any particular fruit ^or vegetable or fertilizing formula, or to any specific piece of work, there is an index.

With such slight rearrangement and editing as

PREFACE

were necessary for transfer from magazine to book the material is the same as it appeared through all the growing weeks of the year in The Country Gentleman. Putting it between covers is in response to requests from readers of that periodical; with the writer's acknowledgment to the Curtis Publishing Company of its courtesy in permitting him to comply with those requests,

C. A. S.

Chapter I

Cold Weather Planning and Reading , . . 1 Garden of the winter vision — Air castles built of the illustrated seed catalogues — Real value of trying to raise things that will match the pictures — Shape of patch and arrangement of varieties — Government is ready to help the possessor of the smallest garden.

Chapter II

Some simple household arithmetic showing the extravagance of paying top prices for wilted vegetables from store or cart when the fresh product can be had at the trivial cost of seed — Food that makes for health — An all-year supply — How to raise potatoes.

CHAPTER III Garden Soils, Good and Bad 19

Ground that needs barnyard manure and that which is better served by the easily handled chemical fertilizer — Detecting and remedying sourness of soil — ^What loam is.

CHAPTER IV Tools That Are Essential 28

A hoe is not a good hoe unless it just suits the gardener who uses it — High value of the human fingers in the war on weeds — Weeders with short handles — Many useless things.

CHAPTER V Garden Eugenics . . = o . , o . . 38

Plants must be well born and have decent growing conditions from the start — Drain the mud holes — Ditch construction — Insect and fungous enemies classified — Ways to fight them.

CHAPTER VI Water Whenever Needed 53

Gardens that are ruined needlessly because their owners depend upon rain alone — Simple and inexpensive methods of irrigation for small areas — The part that moisture plays in plant growth.

CHAPTER VII Garden Mistakes op Various Sorts . . . . 6S'

Every grower should make an honestly complete record of all the blunders he has been guilty of — A useful chart for doing better work in the next garden — Sample grouping of errors.

CHAPTER VIII Taking Planting Cues from Nature ... 77

Blossoming of the fruit trees is a surer sign for the beginning of garden work than the arbitrary say-so of the almanac — The number of days available — Rules for all vegetables.

CHAPTER XII April — The Third Week, Continued . » .126

Setting out fruit trees — Beware of the travelling agent — Go direct to the nurseryman — Advantages of the dwarf trees in the small garden — Fertilizers for the several varieties — Unusual fruits.

Chapter XIII

Lettuce ^\^ll head up and have a heart if you get the right variety and handle it properly — Nitrate of soda for quick growth and a crisp plant — Cabbage and cauliflower.

Chapter XIV

Sweet corn culture — Selection of seed — Much hoeing and then more hoeing are necessary — Old sod land makes the ideal soil — Rapid growth in hot weather — There is an ideal way for beans.

xi

CHAPTER XV May — The Second Half 161

Methods for raising the perfect melon — The advantage of using glass boxes in the garden for getting an early crop— Manure at the bottoms of the hills — Cures for blight — Rules for cucumbers — The border of parsley.

CHAPTER XXVI September 266

End of the "putting-up" season — Best time to pick fruit — Storage for the root crops — Different temperatures needed by different varieties of vegetables but all must be kept dry.

CHAPTER XXVH September — Continued 283

Setting out grape vines — Compromise plan to get both fruit and foliage— Cuttings and layerings — Use of the vine for screening purposes — The several methods of grafting.

CHAPTER I COIiD WEATHER PLANNING AND READING

Too often the calendar for the planting of seed starts with April — March at the earliest — and closes with September, as if the world of the gardener began with a spring radish and ended with a winter turnip. This may be because the calendarmaker, who probably never plants anything, loses sight of the fact that to the true philosopher of the hoe there is no winter. What is called so, merely as a convenience in dividing time, begins, according to the almanac, on December twenty-first. But it really ends there, too, for at that very time the days begin to lengthen and there is nothing like knowing that today has a fraction of a minute more sunlight than yesterday to revive enthusiasm for planting and to stir into life the winter vision of the garden to be.

That vision-garden is of real fniitfulness. The better and bigger its crop of plans and hopes the more fresh vegetables there will be on the dreamer^s table six months later. You raise the dreams in rows or broadcast, according to fancy, on the snowcovered, frost-filled patch that looks so barren to those outside the cult.

So the calendar should say " plant now," meaning the first of February or, any other time after the winter solstice on December twenty-first — in northern latitudes it might be well to wait till just after Christmas — and then should follow the cultural directions for the beginner.

An ideal location for the vision-garden is in front of an open fire in an out-of-town house, although suburban stove or radiator will do almost as well, and some wonderful crops have been grown in city flats and even in hall bedrooms equipped with oil heaters ready to form a protecting smudge, such as they use in orchards, to save the dreams from winter-killing when the janitor shuts off the heat. Having selected the site, build a small air-castle in one corner, shielded from northeast winds, for the storage of bulbs, watering pot, gardening tools and seed catalogues. If the gardener is short of building materials for such a structure he may use the seed catalogues themselves. They make wonderful air-castles of regular skyscraper dimensions. May the poets who write these catalogues and the artists who illustrate them never grow less fanciful and colorful! They show the tomato that everybody aspires to raise and therefore give the benefit of an aspiration. They fill the picture pods with pictiire peas that Nature never knew. They produce strawberries bigger and redder than those your grandfather remembers as growing in his grandfather's garden when he was a boy.

So these catalogues serve a useful purpose by furnishing an ideal. It is easy to prove. Let one gardener struggle to raise a potato that will conform to the dimensions and shapeliness of the pictured vegetable, that will rival the mealiness of the description. Now let his neighbour be contented to take as his model such a potato as he can buy at the grocery store. Which will get the better crop?

Pencil and paper are indispensable tools for this February job of sowing dreams, because the garden grows so fast that unless you keep strict account one thing will overrun another and neither will do so well. Begin by drawing the outer boundaries, making the plan oblong if you have the room; if not, square. It is better to have a circle or a triangle or any other shape known to the geometry-makers than not to have a garden at all. The long garden is simply the ideal sort because of the economy of time and strength in caring for it. It is easier to do the hoeing up and down long rows, especially if you use one of those handy little wheel hoes.

For the same reason put plants of similar size and shape and those which require similar treatment in the same part of the garden. If you do not want to plant enough peas, for instance, to fill out one or more complete rows finish out the vacant place with bush beans, so that the two kinds of vegetables which are to be cultivated in the same way may receive attention at the same hoeing without unnecessary effort. That is a point one is apt to forget while working in the vision-garden across which you can stride without getting up from the armchair. But minutes do count when the real fun and business begin, especially if you are commuting and that 5:19 train is apt to be late and cheat you out of your weeding hour, or if your wife insists on your going to church Sunday morning.

In running things together on your preliminary sheet of plans do not forget to leave space for the subsequent plantings of the same thing. A garden is only half a garden that does not provide for successive crops and a continuous feast all through the growing season.

Eggplants and peppers naturally go together in a separate group not far from the tomatoes — three things which will not come on the stage until the rest of the garden is well under way. Beets, turnips, carrots and parsnips belong in the same section; the cabbage and cauliflower in another. Give the potatoes as much room as you can spare. Nothing gives the amateur such a boastful, professionallike feeling as to raise his own potatoes. Not that it is difficult, but they seem so much more like real staple food supply, so much more businesslike than radishes, for example. Of course the suburban gardener who actually raises enough potatoes to carry him through the winter becomes a political economist and is qualified to deliver lectures at the church men's club on the high cost of Hving problem and how to prevent famines in China.

Onions, for which you will put out sets without bothering with seed, deserve good room. If you do not love them now get the appetite. They are better for next winter's colds in the family heads than many grains of quinine.

The corn, as even the amateur having his very first garden dream must know, grows high and so makes shade. It must be placed where its waving stalks w411 not cheat the other inhabitants of their fair share of light and air. The same thing is true of the pole-twining limas.

As the proof of the garden is in the eating of the meals that come out of it there must be salad material in abundance. So make generous allowance for the lettuce bed — one that will last all summer by planting new ground and replanting on the old. Then draw a series of circles and mark them for the cucumber hills. To provide the dinner dessert or the breakfast appetizer give the melon patch all the space you can on your mid-winter paper plan. Then add a few more square feet to that and, finally, leave a marginal strip for a strawberry bed.

The amateur gardener reading his latest book on horticulture, and his classically ambitious daughter at the other side of the library table doing her afterdinner school work in Latin, may be reading practically the same thing without either realising it.

Somewhere in his guide book, printed for the coming season, the gardener will be warned not to try to work his ground before the March winds have dried out the mud left by the departing frost. He Avill read that wood ashes are excellent for the soil, that he must be generous with the manure pile, that he must put each thing in the place best adapted to it, that after harrowing or raking his ploughed or spaded ground it will help the soil a lot to smooth and pulverize the surface still further by dragging brush over it.

On her side of the droplight the schoolgirl, with an occasional sigh and frequent fluttering references to the vocabulary in the back of the book, will manage to dig the following translation out of her Virgil, written two thousand years before her father ever thought of having a garden :

" In early spring, as soon as the dissolving snow melts on the white mountains and the earth crumbles, unbound by the wind, even then let my plough be pressed down. But before our iron cuts an unbroken plain, first let us learn with care the winds and changing habits of the sky, the natural culture and disposition of the ground and what each plot will produce or refuse to bear. Here corn grows happiest, there the vines ; there flourish fruit trees best and herbs unbidden spring.

" Be not ashamed to soak the arid soil with rich dung or freely to cast the smutty ashes on the exhausted fields. Very greatly does he help the fields who with harrows breaks the sluggish sods and drags over them the osier hurdles."

And so on, through all the practical garden book of the present and the pastoral of 40 B. C, or thereabouts, will be found corresponding hints to the gardener, the chief difference being that the first is in prose and the other in blank verse.

Virgil himself was, comparatively, a modern garden writer. They used to accuse him of stealing a lot of his agricultural lore from Hesiod, who had advised the Greeks how to manage their crops seven centuries or so before Virgil saw his first dandelion, or whatever the early spring flower happened to be in his part of the world. But when Hesiod gave his advice the world already had been following it for ages.

That is one of the fascinating things revealed by books about having a garden — the continuity of the thing. You are doing what the ancients did in practically the same way, for the same purpose and getting the same results. Of what other form of human activity can this be said.?

Of course we have more tools, some of them made for the profit of the dealer rather than for the benefit of the garden, and we have more books, covering a thousand more details — see the United States Agricultural Department's list of free literature — but on the fundamental principles there is little new. The most modern government writer in Washington is giving the gardeners of the country the same good advice on the main points that Virgil gave the Romans and Hesiod the Greeks.

However, after a little winter reading of the classics, just for fun and to give an added touch of sentiment and tradition to the work with the hoe — to exalt the manure pile, so to speak — it is better to switch to the modem books to save time and to get specific instructions in details. It is remarkable how numerous and how good those books are — there are enough of them, almost, for every gardener to have his own pet volume, and not the same as his neighbour's. There are probably more pamphlets on radish culture, for example, than on the care of babies. Begin this book-learning part of your garden work by writing to the agricultural experiment station of your own state and to the Agricultural Department at Washington for their lists of free publications. This suggestion is as much for the man with a ten-foot garden of flowers or vegetables as for the farmer with many acres, for no patch of ground is too small for the Government to recognise as worthy of cultivation and no problem too simple for its aid.

Provided with the lists, which include subjects all the way from pig management to violets, the amateur gardener can select the pamphlets that cover his particular needs and be sure of finding in them all the help he wants.

If your neighbour in the country happens to be a professional gardener or a farmer who takes no stock in scientific methods — there are a few such left — be friendly and tell him about your advice from Washington, for it will amuse him. And you may be sure he will watch your garden as closely as he does his own, for, no matter how much he scofFs, he cannot help being curious. Produce a good crop of this or that, and he will come round sheepishly and ask if you mind lending him that book.

Then 3^ou will have the satisfaction of being in the rapidly growing army of agricultural missionaries, recruited each spring from the thousands of " city greenhorns " who move to the land but who must, because of their ignorance, preface actual experience with reading what experts have written, and who thus learn a thing or two to show the men who have tilled the ground all their lives.

Chapter II

The figures that follow are only approximate. Every gardener or grocery-store patron probably could add something to or subtract something from them, but they are near enough to a fair average to demonstrate that Everyman's garden may materially lessen the family's cost of living.

One quart of seed com is enough to plant one hundred hills. It costs about thirty-five cents. The one hundred hills, under normal conditions and with reasonable care, should produce six hundred ears — that is, fifty dozen. For good early com at the store the householder pays about twenty-two cents a dozen — for the fifty dozen eleven dollars, as against thirty-five cents for raising the same amount in Everyman's garden. Does such a garden pay? It would seem so.

Take potatoes. A peck of seed, enough for four 1£ rows, each twenty-five feet long, costs from seventy-five cents to a dollar according to variety; eighty-five cents is a good average. This seed ought to yield six pecks, or a bushel and a half. New potatoes sell at the best stores when they first come into market as high as a dollar and a half a bushel. The bushel and a half which Everyman might grow from his eighty-five cents' worth of seed would cost him two dollars and a quarter at his grocer's. The potato corroborates the corn as to the benefit to the household account to be derived from intelligent use of the soil back of the house.

Why pay eight cents apiece for the first cucumbers and five cents later on.^ A small packet of seed, costing not more than ten cents, will plant twenty hills, which will yield at least six dollars' worth of cucumbers, at store valuation.

Thirty-five cents will buy a quart of seed for four twenty-five-foot rows of bush beans, enough to supply the average family for three weeks. Beans sell at the store at ten cents a quart. One good mess from the grocer costs more than the seed for all four bean rows in the garden.

The earliest peas, those that every man with a 13 normal appetite and healthy enjoyment of food expects to have on his table not later than the middle of June, or by July Fourth in New England, cost seventy-five cents a peck. For twenty cents he can get a pint of seed that will give him a fifty-foot strip of peas in his own garden. And nobody who has eaten peas from his own garden ever wants any more from the store. He may eat beans or potatoes or carrots from the store or the huckster's wagon ; to save himself from starvation he might nibble a little of the grocer's flavourless, three-day-old corn; but for the grocer's peas his own vines have spoiled him for all time.

The price of melons or cantaloupes runs all the way from two for a quarter to six for a quarter, according to season. But for twenty cents Everyman can buy enough seed for twenty-five hills of melons, which should enable every member of his family to have a whole one for breakfast every morning during the season.

This story of the garden, as told in dollars and cents, holds true for every vegetable on the list. And the cost of fertilizer, whether from the chemical factory or the barnyard, amounts to so little for the small garden that it hardly detracts from the balance on the right side of the table expense account. It is much more than offset by increased nutriment values, by better health and digestion, and by greater satisfaction of all the members of the family — all of which come from eating absolutely fresh vegetables rather than the wilted sort from the store or cart.

After allowing two dollars for one day of hired help on the preliminary spading, or five dollars for the services of a man and team with plough and harrow, there is no labour cost to Everyman's Garden because there should be no labour, in the burdensome sense of the word ; nothing but pleasure and the most wholesome sort of exercise. Instead of charging anything for his own time and effort, the gardener might go so far the other way as to put his work down as profit — a saving of doctor's bills and athletic club dues.

Of course the saving on the cost of living by means of a garden is not confined to the actual growing season. There are canning and preserving possibilities to be taken into consideration. From the summer surplus of the garden a large part — by far the most palatable and healthy part — of the food supply for the coming winter can be obtained in the shape of canned peas and beans, com and tomatoes, pickled cucumbers, and various other things that every housewife knows about. The canned products of home raising and preserving are fully as preferable to the store supplies in tin as are the fresh vegetables superior to the stock of the huckster's cart, and the margin of nutriment and safety to health is much greater.

Then, too, there are the regular winter vegetables — potatoes, carrots, turnips, onions, parsnips, celery and all the rest that are to be stored. Nothing makes Everyman in his garden feel quite so important, so much a man of substance in the community, as to produce, for the first time, his winter supply of these vegetables.

To get all that food and satisfaction it is worth while to take pains and do the thing in the best way, So here are some suggestions for that household staple, the potato. In the first place do not plant potatoes where they were last year. As a matter of fact the longer interval between two plantings on the same piece of ground, the better, for potatoes are subject to several diseases, notably scab, the germs of which remain alive in the soil from one season to the next and attack the following crop. These scab germs may be on the seed potatoes themselves, so it is well, before cutting, to soak them for two hours in a solution of a gill — four ounces — of formaldehyde in seven quarts of water or to put them in an air-tight outbuilding or a room in the cellar and burn there a formaldehyde candle, which may be bought for a quarter or less at the drug store.

The next question is cutting. Commercial growers, as a rule, leave two eyes on each seed piece to be put in the ground. For the amateur a sensible thing is to cut each in halves.

As potatoes grow all the way from coast to coast and from Alaska to Mexico no amateur gardener in the United States need fear to try a crop. However the ideal soil is a sandy loam and it must be well drained, for too much moisture will rot the seed. If there is no such soil available its advantages may be obtained, in part at least, by drainage and by the ploughing under of a lot of barnyard manure, not only to enrich the soil but to loosen it.

Deep tillage is necessary in preparation of the ground, and after the ground has been thoroughly ploughed the seed pieces should be covered by four inches of earth. The potato cannot thrive if it is skimped in its supply of nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash. Barnyard manure will supply these in sufficient quantity and right proportions, but if the soil is naturally of the right texture or has been heavily manured for a season or two before, it is better to use a chemical fertilizer. No fertilizer of any sort should come in direct contact with the seed.

If ground space is ample plant in hills two feet apart each way — two feet and a half is better for cultivation. Drop three seed pieces in each hill. If space is limited plant in rows, or drills, two feet apart and drop two seed pieces every foot in each row.

Chapter III Garden Soils, Good And Bad

Loam is a mixture of sand or clay with many years' accumulation of decomposed vegetable matter, such as leaves, plant stems, rotted sod and weeds, and decayed fragments of wood. The base of this blend may be clay or sand or both, but it is not loam unless the rotted vegetable substance, technically known as organic matter or humus, is there in sufficient quantity and transforms it into a life-giving blend for more plants, which in their turn will die and add their stems and leaves, thereby increasing the loaminess.

No apology is offered for this definition of the very stuff of which the garden is made. To some it may seem as obvious and as unnecessary as to define water as a liquid, but, to nine amateur gardeners out of ten, soil terms, used so glibly by the experts, are a puzzle. Loam is one of them. Beginners read of sour soil and sweet soil, light soil and heavy soil, loam, sandy loam and clayey loam, and wonder what it all means. Fortunately they can go ahead and have very good gardens without solving the puzzle, but knowing why, in the long run, may become as useful as knowing how. At any rate, it adds one hundred per cent to the pleasure, if not quite as much as that to the profit, of having the garden.

In this respect you may look at your garden in several different figurative ways in addition to considering it as so many square feet of dirt out of which you can take flowers and vegetables every year for some reason or other that you know nothing about. In one sense it is a bank where you have principal on deposit in the shape of soil substance and fertility. The vegetable crop is the annual interest and that may be decreased from year to year to the vanishing point or greatly increased in quantity and quality according to whether you impair the principal or add to it.

Again, the garden is a chemical laboratory in which many wizard-like performances are always going on to produce the desired plant life. With the

W laboratory, as with the bank, the gardener must cooperate. He must know what chemicals are lacking and how and when, in what quantities and in what shape to supply them. We hear a great deal about scientific farming, comparatively little about scientific gardening. But a very little science will do as much in proportion for a back lot, otherwise hopeless for a garden, as it will for one of the muchtalked-of abandoned farms.

So to begin with the soil — the ideal sort for the garden is the light and sweet sandy loam. The primitive way, assuming now the case of the man who has just moved from city to suburbs, is to plant the garden on the spot available, without knowing anything of its fertility or texture, past uses or abuses, and trust to luck and the hoe.

But in spite of constant and faithful work with that hoe and all the other garden tools, the vegetable interest returns on the principal invested in work and seed and manure may be scant as to quality and quantity. If the labour has not been skimped it may be taken for granted there is something wrong with the soil. If that fact is ascertained at the beginning of the season instead of at the end, as it may be, the defect can be remedied in advance and the very first season's attempt of the amateur made a success instead of a failure.

Too much acidity is one of the chief causes of failure on ground long neglected or misused — in other words sour soil. Whether the patch selected for the garden is sour or sweet may be learned absolutely by anybody not colour-blind at the cost of five cents in money and five minutes in time. The trick can be done winter or summer.

Invest a nickel at any drug store in half a dozen strips of blue litmus paper. Place one of them in a handful of soil where it is damp. If it turns red there is too much acid there; the soil is sour. Try the same experiment in various other parts of the garden with the other strips of paper, so as to get a line on the whole patch. If it shows enough acid to turn the paper the trouble can be remedied at small expense by sprinkling on lime, say, a pound for every twenty square feet, and raking it in. That is a liberal allowance ; the same amount is put on to prepare land in the East for alfalfa, and no other crop is so absolutely dependent on sweetness of soil as alfalfa.