136 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [18:3— Mch., 1921 



This is well illustrated by Steve Wranish and his garden which was 

 No. 63. I was all summer teaching Steve that his number was not 

 3 but 63 . At the last he would say 3 but could think of the 60 when 

 I insisted. Speaking of Steve reminds me that I had at least 10 

 children this year so mentally deficient I could not teach them the 

 difference between flowers, plants, or weeds. Two were so hope- 

 less I had to take their gardens away and put them out. They 

 would pull up anything. And when I think of the others, I wonder 

 that we had any gardens at all. 



After public and parochial schools are closed for the summer all 

 garden work begins at 8:30 a. m. The new time is very disad- 

 vantageous to garden work in some ways. Gardens are so cold and 

 wet mornings and it takes them so long to dry off, w^e have to work 

 many times when the ground is unfit, to get our work out of the 

 way before the. swimming and other play ground activities begin. 

 (Our gardens border on the playgrounds) . 



This was a splendid year for beans and beets, we never had nicer 

 ones and every thing else did well. It seems to have been a good 

 garden season in spite of the preponderance of cold weather.. In 

 fact I never heard so many people say "How nice your garden 

 looks." They really are beautiful. It is partially due to our new 

 system of water pipes which enables us to do the work more 

 thoroughly in much less tim.e. 



With the exception of a few children who are habitually trouble- 

 som.e, it is the consensus of opinion among the playground teachers 

 and myself that the people in the vicinity of the playgroimds and 

 gardens are really improving very much. The gardens are not 

 destroyed as they used to be and there was comparatively little 

 thieving. It is a noteworthy fact that the garden situated next the 

 bunk houses full of colored people and with many colored people 

 living in the tenements near it, has suffered scarcely at all. What 

 thieving is done, is by the white foreign people. It is also interest- 

 ing to see the gardens that were planted this year in the yards along 

 the alley bordering on the garden. I counted eleven individual 

 gardens fenced off, some of the fences being old beds springs. 

 Five years ago they believed nothing would grow there. 



There has always been a popular belief in Duquesne that the 

 gases from the mills and the dirt from them would kill all vegeta- 

 tion and that it was a useless task to try to make anything grow. 

 Our gardening propaganda has done much to correct this idea and 



