VIII 

 FERTILIZING AND FERTILIZERS 



IT is astonishing that such a measure of good luck 

 attends the guesses which most of us make at supply- 

 ing the needs of the soil or to be more exact, the needs 

 of the plants which grow in the soil because veiy 

 few really know anything about it. But of course the 

 makers of commercial fertilizers have helped us greatly, 

 and there are many, scientifically compounded and of 

 real value, upon the market, every pound accompanied 

 with directions for its application to the soil. What 

 these compounds do, however, and why they do it, and 

 why it needs doing, are details of the matter that even 

 very advanced gardeners do not trouble to concern them- 

 selves with at least not often. The general idea is to 

 make the soil "rich," and if one thing doesn't produce 

 a crop luxuriant enough to indicate that this has been 

 accomplished, something else is tried something that is 

 hit upon somehow, somewhere, that somebody says is 

 good because it has benefited some other garden. 



Of course everybody knows that the growth of a 

 plant requires food just as much as the growth of a chiM 

 or a bird or anything else in creation requires food. 



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