Pin Money Crops for the Home Gardener— By f. f. Rockwell 



I. Opportunities and Limitations 



Editor's Note: This introductory article is the first of a series that will appear during the year in which the big opportunities of a really small garden 

 will be emphasized. The possibility of making a small cash return from the back yard will appeal to many suburban home makers who are still "buying a home." 

 The thought in these articles is not commercial production in the ordinary sense but rather suggestive of ways and means to make the garden plot do a little more than 

 just feed the family. 



UP TO the limit of what the family can use, 

 the kitchen garden offers the most profit- 

 able employment for such space as may 

 be available on the small place. Up to 

 that limit; but it is because this limit is lost sight of, 

 in nineteen cases out of twenty, that the possibility 

 of cash profits from the small garden is seldom real- 

 ized. Almost invariably the home garden is planned 

 to fit the available land — a tenth-of-an-acre, 

 quarter-acre, or acre, as the case may be. The con- 

 sequence is that the most intensive methods of culti- 

 vation are not employed; a great deal more of many 

 things than are actually needed are grown, and farm 

 crops such as pumpkins, squash, potatoes, large 

 varieties of sweet corn and other space-users, which 

 should have no space in the small garden that is 

 planned for maximum profits, are used to "fill up" 

 the spare room. 



To get the greatest possible amount of returns 

 from his limited amount of ground, the small gar- 

 dener must make a radical change in his methods. 

 He must plan his garden to fit the table, instead of 

 planning it to fit his garden plot. The very mini- 

 mum amount of space possible should be used for 

 supplying the home table — and when you really 

 set yourself to the task you will find that you can 

 grow on a quarter of an acre practically everything, 

 with a few unimportant exceptions, that you have 

 heretofore been growing on a half acre. I am not 

 saying that you can do it with half the work, mind 

 you; it may take as much, or nearly as much, in time 

 and money for fertilizer, seed and so forth, as it did 

 before; it will take a great deal more in care and skill 

 in garden planning. But the advantage will be 

 that at least a good part of your garden space will 

 be available for the growing of some cash profit crop. 



IS IT WORTH WHILE 



Is it worth while? Can profits be made on small 

 plots? Can the "pin money" gardener compete 

 successfully with the professional market gardener? 

 Naturally these questions will arise. They can all 

 be answered in the affirmative. Minimum profit 

 of from twenty to two hundred dollars should be 

 possible on one-tenth to one-half acre cash crops, 

 according to the time that can be given, to the 

 skill of the gardener, and the amount of the crop. 

 Profits greatly in excess of these, on small areas, 

 are by no means exceptional. 



The quarter-acre gardener has several very de- 

 cided advantages over the commercial grower. In 

 the first place, results are feasible on a small scale 

 which are practically impossible where things are 

 grown by the acre. Onions have yielded at the 

 rate of 2,700 bushels to the acre! At the rate — that is 

 the point ! A few short rows produced more than 60 

 bushels — they are worth a dollar and a half a bushel. 

 Two or three times as many perhaps could have 

 been produced at the same rate; the ground was 

 fertilized cheaply with hen manure and hard wood 

 ashes — the product of the home place. They were 

 grown by the "transplanting method," which will 

 be described in detail in a later issue. Strawberries 

 grown by the hill system in intensive cultivation 

 will yield a quart to the plant — at the rate of twenty 

 thousands of quarts or two to three thousands 

 dollars per acre! But growers who plant straw- 

 berries by the acre, on account of labor and other 

 reasons, do not find it feasible to employ this method 

 which is perfectly practicable for a small plot. 

 Celery, salads, melons and a few other things offer 

 the same possibilities of a tremendous percentage of 

 profit when grown on a small scale. 



Nor are the profits from pin-money crops con- 

 fined to vegetables. Flowers for cutting can be 

 grown in abundance at very slight cost. Those 

 which are most certain to give satisfactory results, 

 and most likely to find a ready demand after they 

 are grown, will be mentioned in detail later. The 

 possibilities in the growing of plants, both flower and 

 vegetable, for a small retail trade, with detailed 

 instructions for getting a start in this interesting 

 and profitable line, will also be discussed. 



THE SMALL GROWER'S ADVANTAGE 



The small grower also enjoys some other real ad- 

 vantages. In commercial gardening, the grower 

 meets a much more serious problem in finding a 

 profitable market for his crop than in producing it 

 at a low cost. From fifty to eighty cents of the 

 consumer's dollar never gets to the grower. The 

 small grower often has the chance to dispose at retail 

 prices of all his products; even where he cannot do 

 this, the prices he will receive from grocers and others 

 selling direct to the consumer, will be from twenty 

 to seventy-five per cent, higher than those which 

 the wholesale grower receives. Moreover, having a 

 highest quality, the small grower enjoys a tremend- 

 ous advantage in his chances of disposing of his en- 

 tire product, as well as getting a better price for it. 

 Furthermore — and this is a point which no one who 

 has never tried to grow crops on a commercial scale 

 can appreciate — the pin money gardener will have 

 no labor problem. He can charge up his own time 

 on the crop he may be growing or not — that is a 

 matter of bookkeeping which will not affect the 

 actual cash returns from his work. That is a minor 

 point. The important thing is that he will not find 

 himself staring a crop failure in the face because he 

 can not get extra "hands," at any price, just when 

 he has to have them. For the most part he fur- 

 nishes his own "hands"; and a few hours of extra 

 work if things do seem to be getting ahead of him, or 

 an extra assistant for some half Saturday, will pull 

 him out of the danger. Another thing — statistics 

 show very plainly that the greater the capital em- 

 ployed in proportion to the size of a farming or gar- 

 dening "business," the greater will be the per- 

 centage of profit; and the small grower generally 

 has a great deal more capital in proportion to 

 the operations he undertakes than the average 

 commercial grower — a great deal of that capital 

 may be in the shape of home-made fertilizers, such 

 as hen manure and ashes, labor, power, and so forth, 

 but it is capital nevertheless. That, and the ad- 

 vantages in marketing already mentioned, are two 

 of the things which make possible an exceptionally 

 high percentage of profits from small gardens, al- 

 though they are not generally taken into considera- 

 tion. 



A WORD OF CAUTION 



On the other hand, I want no reader to mis- 

 understand me, nor to get the idea that by simply 

 squeezing his table vegetables up into one half of his 

 garden and by planting onions and celery, or straw- 

 berries and dahlias or gladioli, into the remainder 

 of it, he is going to find himself a couple of hun- 

 dred, fifty or twenty-five dollars ahead in cold 

 cash at the end of the season. 



The lazy, the frail, and the inexperienced gar- 

 dener should plant squash and pumpkins, instead 

 of onions and strawberries. To adopt this plan of 

 making your garden yield greenbacks as well as 

 green vegetables you simply must put into it more 

 thought, more time, more work and more cash. 

 If your vegetable garden already takes all the spare 

 time you can give, and no assistant is available, 

 it would be simply courting trouble and loss to 

 plant more. On the other hand, there is many a 

 garden in which the services of an assistant on Sat- 

 urdays or Saturday afternoons through the season 

 would be a really profitable investment. The mere 

 certainty that you can produce satisfactory results 

 in growing your crop or crops, however, is not a 

 sufficient guarantee to justify undertaking the work; 

 fully as important is the preparation for market 

 and the finding of a market. This side of the ques- 

 tion is, in fact, so vital that in the several subsequent 

 articles that deal with individual crops this matter 

 will receive special attention. 



SOIL MUST FIT THE CROP 



In addition to these factors of success there are 

 some other essentials which should be considered — 

 the first is that of soil. Its condition is more im- 



210 



portant than its type, so long as it is all suited for 

 gardening. If it has been highly cultivated and 

 fertilized for a number of years past, you know 

 what you can count upon in the way of crop produc- 

 tion. Otherwise, your first task should be to make 

 sure of abundant, fine well-rotted manure to give a 

 dressing at least three inches thick; this should not 

 be applied, of course, until just previous to plowing 

 or spading the soil. It is well, also, to engage your 

 fertilizers now so that there will be no delay in get- 

 ting them quickly delivered when you are ready to 

 use them. If you use ready mixed fertilizers, which 

 are the more convenient for the very small garden, 

 be sure to get the very highest grade possible. It 

 should have a minimum analysis of 4 per cent, 

 nitrogen, 8 per cent, of available phosphoric acid 

 and 10 per cent, of potash. If war conditions make 

 it impossible to buy mixed goods with as high a 

 percentage of potash as this, secure all the hard 

 wood ashes you can find locally. For a quarter acre 

 patch 6 to 10 cords of manure, five to ten hundred 

 of high grade market garden fertilizer, ten to fifty 

 bushels of hard wood ashes, would be adequate 

 supplies of these to lay in. Unless the ground is 

 very poor, you would not need the maximum 

 amount mentioned of all. A combination of the 

 mean amounts of all three, will give the quantities 

 and forms of plant-food to produce big crops. 



WATER SUPPLY ESSENTIAL 



Of the other conditions, the most important 

 is an abundant water supply. Most small gardens 

 are situated where water is available. With mod- 

 ern methods of irrigation, such as were described in 

 The Garden Magazine for last July, [a further 

 discussion of these will be presented in a later 

 issue. — Editor.] the gardener can equip a garden 

 of this size, provided hose or pipe to bring the 

 water to the garden is already on hand, for a very 

 few dollars. Big crops are sometimes produced 

 in favorable seasons without artificial irrigation, 

 but I most emphatically advise anybody who 

 expects to achieve maximum results not to at- 

 tempt to get along without artificial irrigation. 

 Hand watering with the hose is not practicable 

 even with such small gardens as we shall con- 

 sider. The time required is too great and the 

 water cannot be properly applied. Incidently, 

 irrigation will double and treble the yield which you 

 can get from the space devoted to growing vege- 

 tables for your own table. 



HAVE A SPECIALTY 



Another point which should be fixed firmly in 

 mind in the beginning is that your chance for success 

 depends very largely upon your making a specialty 

 of one or two things. Growing but one or two crops 

 for profit, and putting your entire attention on 

 these, you will be able to produce them more 

 economically and they will be of better quality; 

 you will, also, be able to get better tools and develop 

 more skill in their use, with one crop, than with six; 

 and what is of still greater importance, in selling you 

 can establish a reputation and develop a market 

 that will take your entire output of one thing where 

 you would find it next to impossible to do it with 

 several. 



WAYS TO. MARKET 



The marketing, varies for the different crops. 

 It may, however, be said in advance that four 

 different methods are open to the home grower 

 ■ — the local retail market, which can be worked up 

 among friends and neighbors; selling direct to the 

 local retailer; selling by parcels post; and the road- 

 side market for automobile trade which, where the 

 proper conditions exist, can be developed to good 

 proportions and is highly profitable because you can 

 get the highest retail price at your own door. Ways 

 of developing these different methods of shipping 

 will be taken up in connection with the crops that 

 are best suited to each. 



