68 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 



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 

 vegetables 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 $1,200 in one year. This, to be sure, 

 was done in the neighborhood of high-priced 

 markets, 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 

 feet in that acre bore its crop, and bore the best 

 crop that could be obtained from it and nothing 

 else. The secret of keeping down weeds was 

 never to let them get a beginning. One man 

 was employed in doing nothing but stir up 

 the earth with a cultivator, with the result that 



