196 The Principles of Vegetable -Gardening 



be sold, for their merits are yet unknown. The 

 advertising attracts the beginner and the person 

 who desires to experiment. The novice selects the 

 novelties. 



Every gardener should have a small area in the 

 personal part of his grounds which he devotes to the 

 testing of new varieties. He should buy a packet of 

 every new variety of those vegetables in which he is 

 particularly interested. He will not have sufficient 

 capital at stake to be disappointed if half of them 

 fail to prove worthy under his conditions and for his 

 ideals. The mental quest is one of the chief delights 

 in the making of experiments. If a novelty fails, the 

 quest is nevertheless as keen and the fun is as great. 

 An experimental plat without failures is not worth the 

 having. The experiment station test will be useful in 

 suggestions, but it cannot tell what varieties will be 

 best for your conditions, markets and ideals. 



Now and then one of the novelties will prove to 

 be useful to the man who tries it. He will then en- 

 large his area of it and test it on a commercial scale. 

 In a year or two it may supplant some of the older 

 varieties. In this way the gardener keeps abreast of 

 the time and ahead of his competitor. Novelties are 

 essential, for we depend on them for progress. 



5. WEEDS 



Weeds are mere incidents in good farming. They 

 are the constants in poor farming. This is not because 

 the good farmer spends more time killing weeds, but 



