PLANTING AND MAINTENANCE 139 



yours at all. Generally speaking, we put too 

 much faith in fertilizers and too little in good 

 care; and many a garden starves for lack of 

 the tillage which would conserve moisture and 

 so make available the plant food with which 

 the soil is loaded, rather than for lack of the 

 food itself. What is called a complete fertihzer, 

 however, which simply means a fertilizer com- 

 bination consisting of the three principal fertil- 

 izer elements in the proportion of one part 

 nitrogen, two parts phosphoric acid, and three 

 parts potash, may usually be used on ordinary 

 soil to the garden's advantage. Fancy mixtures 

 and wonder workers, however, are a waste of 

 time and money — and faith. 



In addition to fertilizer, or rather as a pre- 

 liminary treatment, sour soils need lime. Heavy 

 soils are lightened by it, too, and as sour soils 

 are invariably heavy, it serves a double pur- 

 pose when applied to these. It changes the 

 soil in such a way that the plant food in it is 

 more readily taken up. Coal ashes are excel- 

 lent to mix with earth that is sticky and heavy 

 or stiff and cold, though they have no fertilizing 

 value. But they lighten such soils and make 

 them friable and more gracious. Stable manure 

 is as good as any fertilizer that can be obtained, 

 wherever it may be turned into the ground by 



