» A Plea for the Kitchen-Garden. 93 



food. The unvitiated appetite clamors for froit and vegetables during the 

 warm season ; and it is only by the force of habit that so many are content 

 to live without them. The acid fruits and vegetables serve to counteract 

 the bilious tendency of the summer ; and, were the habit once formed of 

 eating more vegetables and less meat, better health and longer life would 

 be the consequence. We have made many a breakfast of bread and stewed 

 tomato, and uniformly felt a clearer head and lither muscle than when we 

 had breakfasted on beefsteak with its bile-producing gravy. 



There is solid satisfaction, also, in the care of the garden. It was the 

 primeval employment of man, his normal state ; and there is a longing de- 

 sire in most men to own and cultivate a larger or smaller fraction of the 

 earth ; and we should rejoice to see the time when every man could boast 

 of being a lord, a landlord, owning a home of his own, and a garden in 

 which his leisure moments could be profitably and pleasantly spent. There 

 is great pleasure in observing the germination of the seeds sown by our 

 own hand, the gradual development of the vegetables ; and, when mature 

 for the table, we can have them fresh, — no small advantage. The par- 

 taking of home-grown vegetables has a double zest. It is not the mere 

 gratification of one's palate, but the consciousness that we are partaking 

 of the results of our well-directed skill and energy. The pleasure in rais 

 ing one's own fruit and vegetables is analogous to that of the Creator, who 

 looked upon the works of his hands, and pronounced them good. The 

 mechanic may also look with pride on his machinery and buildings ; but the 

 works of the mechanic do not seem so much like creation as the growth 

 of the mammoth cabbage from the tiny seed. The vegetable grows : the 

 building is made. 



The garden is also a school of industry for the children. How the deni- 

 zens of our cities contrive to find employment for their children out of 

 school-hours has always been a mystery to us. With no garden, no chick- 

 ens, no pet lambs and colts, how is the leisure time of the boys filled up "t 

 But let their ambition be roused in having a neat and thrifty garden, and 

 their attention be called to the laws of vegetable physiology, and " raking 

 among the onion-beds will seem to them but play." Labor becomes a recre- 

 ation ; and health, happiness, and habits of industry, are the result. If every 

 man owned a garden, and kept a cow, the time of himself and children 



