My Garden 73 



by Mr. Robert Roosevelt, in his amusing book, 

 Five Acres Too Much. As I have already hinted 

 in my garden talk, there must be hard work 

 and systematic work, and work done in person, 

 and not by proxy. It may be said that the 

 hired man is the bane of every garden so far as 

 actual money-saving is concerned ; ten to one 

 the inexperienced city man will find the wages 

 of his man about double the value of the vege- 

 tables or fruits obtained. There are seasons of 

 extraordinarily bad luck in gardening no rain, 

 or too much rain ; no sun, or all sun ; but with 

 a small garden of an acre or less the intelligent 

 workman is almost master of the situation. I 

 can point to no great money-making operations 

 as the result of my own gardening, but I 

 know of more than one instance in which high 

 culture of a careful and intelligent kind upon 

 one acre of land has produced a money profit 

 of $1200 in one year. This, to be sure, was 

 done in the neighborhood of high-priced mar- 

 kets, and by an expert. The secret of it, as I 

 learned by watching the process almost day by 

 day, was to allow no bit of the plot to go to 

 waste. Every square foot of the 43,560 square 



