72 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



MY GARDEN ON AN ONION. 



By KATHAKINE B. CLAYPOLE. 



THERE was one great difference between this garden of mine 

 and the gardens of my neighbors an enormous difference, 

 I might say for, while they had onions in their gardens, my 

 garden was on an onion. In fact, the onion was my garden, and 

 in some respects this was an advantage to me. I had no soil to 

 prepare, no seed to sow. I had merely to keep my onion a little 

 moist, and the crops appeared of themselves. 



The first to come was a sage-green down, appearing near the 

 neck of the onion, just where the clear, shining scales close round 

 the stalk. If the onion were put into the earth, this stalk would 

 shoot straight up and bear a crown of flowers, followed by a crop 

 of onion seed. It makes efforts to sprout even in a dark cellar. 

 It pushes the scales apart, and the last remnant of life leaves 

 them of their own life, I mean, for, no sooner are they dead, 

 than a host of tiny spores find life-food in their remains. These 

 spores had been falling on my onion scales for months, but, so 

 long as the scales were unbroken, could gain no roothold. Now 

 thousands of them had pushed out little threads, which, branch- 

 ing and interlacing with each other, at last formed a film that the 

 eye could see. Then quickly followed the sage-colored, velvety 

 spots, and I knew that my first crop was ready for examination. 



What was it ? 



The housekeeper called it mold. She said that my onion 

 "had begun to get moldy." Mold is one of her deadly enemies. 

 She recognizes it as a sign of rot or decay, and, wisely from her 

 point of view, she gets rid of it as quickly as possible. I called it 

 mold also a mold. For I knew that before long there would 

 appear other crops unlike this one, yet like enough to bear the 

 name of mold also. I knew, too, that though these molds are 

 almost too small to be seen by the naked eye, they have Cousins 

 that every one knows by sight. There are the mushrooms, the 

 toadstools yellow, red, and brown the gigantic puff-balls, and 

 many an odd-looking mass simply called "a fungus." The term 

 fungus, or more often its plural form fungi, denotes a most per- 

 sistent, industrious class of plants whose one aim in life is the 

 production of millions and millions of spores. The sage-green 

 spots on the neck of my onion were the spores of a fungus. 

 With a needle I could scatter them like a cloud of fine powder. 

 But I could not see how they were growing on the little plants 

 without a microscope that would magnify them about three hun- 

 dred times. 



