My New Zealand Garden 5 



good dressing of paddock manure this means 

 free from straw, as the majority of horses spend 

 their spare time in the open air, the more fortunate 

 of them being clothed in winter with a rug of 

 sail-cloth lined with felt, which will resist rain for 

 twenty-four hours. It is not every summer that 

 Melons will rush ahead without let or hindrance, 

 but the summer that yielded my best crop was 

 such as Melons love, with warm showers and no 

 wind, and the result of this harvest was seventy 

 fine Melons, the heaviest weighing ten pounds. I 

 was so elated at my good success that I gave 

 them away right and left, as three or four ripened 

 every day. But I was not to escape a nasty 

 knock from an ungrateful recipient, the gardening 

 man, who said he had ' biled it well and it woan't 

 no better than the t'others,' and he gave me one 

 of his own home-grown Pumpkins to prove how 

 much' better his was when ' biled ' ; and so it was. 

 Had it not been for the bad subsoil, my labours 

 would have been a comparative sinecure, but the 

 battle against it has ended in victory for me, and 

 I really enjoyed the fight ; or, perhaps, speaking 

 more truthfully, chiefly looking on at it, for I 

 found Mother Subsoil too heavy to deal with, 

 much resembling yellow soap intermixed with 

 iron-stone. However, the happy consummation of 

 all that labour is the utter defeat of that bad 

 mixture ; and, whereas it was only 6 inches 



