No. 4.] MARKET GARDENING. 71 



educate the children in case I should be taken away. It may 

 be well enough to carry a life insurance policy. I do that, 

 and I call it a good investment. But experience and hard 

 knocking against the world have taught me to believe that a 

 trade or profession or useful work of some pleasant sort is 

 one of the best things a woman can inherit. My conviction 

 is that if I can leave my wife on a little place back from the 

 town, with a knowledge of fruit and vegetable growing, she 

 will be far better able to make a good woman and a sound 

 man out of the baby and the boy tiian she would cooped up 

 in any town at teaching school or dressmaking. We just 

 made up our minds to go back to the land for the best part 

 of life. And it so happened that at about this time there 

 came into my family a young man of no special training in 

 any line, simply a big, strong fellow, with a good mind and 

 a love for country life. Twenty miles out of New York we 

 found a little place that for the past twentj^ years has been 

 sucked by tenant after tenant. There was not a piece of sod 

 on the place as large as my hand except along the old fence 

 rows. I will say that the first thing we did was to pull up 

 every inside fence and haul them to the wood pile for fuel. 

 Most of this land was so poor that little besides mullein would 

 grow on it. The soil, like that of many of your hill farms, 

 was originally a warm loam of fair quality, but there was 

 nothing which was available, at least so the tenants said, 

 except weed seed. We picked out this farm for a market 

 garden and a home, to the disgust and amusement of every 

 practical farmer in the neighborhood. I think we were set 

 down as lunatics, when I further said that I had taken a 

 solemn oath never to buy an ounce of stable manure. As a 

 matter of fiict, we break most of the rules of market garden- 

 ing ; l)ut my lielief is that every rule, except the Golden 

 Rule, was made to be broken, just as soon as the truth got 

 into it and has a chance to expand. 



Gardeners in our country seem to consider the following 

 principles as fixed as the north 8tar : First, stable manure is 

 an absolute necessity, — there is nothing that can touch it in 

 efl'ectiveness. Second, soil is only a plate out of which the 

 plant must eat its stable manure. " Don't let the soil, itself, 

 be touched," say our market-gardening friends; "it is too 



