32 MY GROWING GARDEN 



pile worked through an inch-mesh screen, giving 

 me a remainder of soft, rich black earth, the much- 

 to-be-desired ' 'leaf -mold,'* which is greatly com- 

 mended by gardeners for many things, and which 

 is most helpful when mixed into this lumpy shale 

 at Breeze Hill. 



I bought some leaf-mold three years ago, in 

 which to plant certain rhododendrons from the 

 woods. It cost me, delivered on the place, $4.15 

 per cubic yard, which puts a value on the product 

 of my muck-pile, that product being exactly as 

 good as the purchased article. That muck-pile, 

 by the way, can rightly be termed, instead, a soil 

 factory; for it has taken shape so that at one end 

 the lovely, soft "black dirt" can be screened out, 

 while at the other end are accumulating leaves, 

 weeds, stems and all forms of soft and not woody 

 vegetable waste. 



If any reader of these words takes weariness at 

 details of manure and muck, let him thereby know 

 that for him a garden will never really grow, in the 

 true sense ! It is to me worth while to see nature's 

 prodigality in leaf and stem and succulent plant 

 body returned to the earth that gave it, enriched 

 with the precious nitrogen taken from the air; and 

 no less a joy to see animal excrement rot down into 

 black humus, the finest of all fertilizers. And to 



