How to manage a Garden 



thoroughness and in practical results the hard and honest 

 work of a good spade. It seldom goes deeper than 

 nine inches, whilst a good workman with a suitable 

 spade will dig quite one foot, and the difference of 

 three inches in root-room throughout a plot is going 

 to have considerable influence on the cropping. In 

 the case of ploughed land there is not the opportunity 

 of breaking up the soil which exists in the case of 

 spade tillage. The chief objection in fact the only 

 one that carries weight against the spade is that it 

 costs more. Again we see that a man's principles are 

 usually founded on his pocket. It was, I believe, Carlyle 

 who said that "not one man in a thousand has the 

 slightest turn for thinking." Men will content them- 

 selves with scratching the surface of a subject just as 

 they will but tickle the upper part of the soil. It may 

 be harder work to dig deeply with a spade, it will certainly 

 entail greater cost, but it will also produce the biggest 

 dividend. As we expect our income to be greater when 

 we spend more capital, so must our produce increase 

 as we cultivate more soil. Those who have had the 

 advantage of seeing corn grown on land that has pre- 

 viously been used as a garden, and on ordinary farm 

 land will find the difference very conspicuously in favour 

 of the garden which has during former years been deeply 

 dug. 



Trenching. 



I have before mentioned that there is really no such 

 thing as unfertile land. As long as the soil is still, that 

 is to say, not blown away as in sand-storms, the cultiva- 

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