ABOUT MAKING GARDENS 85 



The potatoes will come up through this, and they 

 will need neither cultivating nor hoeing. Over your 

 strawberry bed, as cold weather comes on, spread 

 a covering of compost, not necessarily quite decom- 

 posed, but entirely free from seeds. In the spring 

 rake this winter protection off the plants into the 

 alleys and let it stay there as mulch, to be plowed 

 under in the late summer. 



So you may go from garden to garden, and there 

 is not a spot where mulching is not all important. 

 As for setting roses and shrubs without mulch, you 

 will lose the best half and stunt the rest. It will 

 require watering continually to keep them alive, 

 whereas mulch would have saved the whole, and gen- 

 erally without irrigation. I want you to put em- 

 phasis on this matter of mulching, because it will 

 save you a lot of labor and vexation. 



So we make garden in the Northern States along 

 from April till July, but in Florida we make gar- 

 den when we please planting Irish potatoes in 

 February, melons in March, but our cabbages are 

 ready for cutting in January, and our celery and 

 lettuce we harvest three times a year. The best time 

 to make garden is when we can get our crops ready 

 to touch the empty Northern market ahead of any- 

 body else. Florida laughs at all other lands, be- 

 cause it can put its peaches into Philadelphia and 

 New York two weeks earlier than Georgia, and it 

 is the same with melons and cucumbers. 



However, all of this is not as easy as play, for a 



