26 Gardening 
Fic. 22. ‘Weeds and bugs claim much of the attention of the gardener; but 
if he be master of his business, he will destroy the former as soon as they germi- 
nate, and the latter during the earliest stages of their growth.” Old Farmer’s 
Almanac 
A gardener is, therefore, a caretaker of plants — one 
who watches over them and sees that their needs are 
supplied, so that they will flourish and yield him an 
abundant crop. 
Learning to be a gardener. One may learn much 
about how to grow plants by growing them. By obsery- 
ing how our garden plants develop under different 
conditions, we may judge what is best for them. It 
was thus that our ancestors learned to raise plants, for 
gardening is indeed an old art. In fact, many of our 
important food crops were cultivated before the days 
of writteri history. Man learned how to grow plants 
long before he knew much about how plants grow. 
But within the last hundred years plants have been 
carefully studied in order to find (1) how they obtain 
food materials from the soil, (2) what sorts of food 
