Efficiency in Backyard 

 Gardening, III 



By A. Kruhm, owo 



Intensive cultivation; growing lettuce between the 

 rows of peas 



UNLESS you firmly make up 

 your mind to treat the gar- 

 den seriously, don't start it. 

 Starting means that you 

 assume duties that extend over six months. 

 The success of every backyard garden 

 depends primarily on these three lines of 

 activity: 



I. Intelligent planning of the whole garden. 

 II. The proper utilization of every row. 

 III. Making the best use of limited space. 



The beginning of every "worth while" 

 garden must be made on a sheet of paper. 

 It must be planned just as an architect 

 plans a house. Work out a general plan, 

 expressing the broad ideas of the gardener 

 and add extra detail plans to take care of 

 changes made by the ruling architects, 

 Season & Weather. Every good garden I 

 have ever seen was started with a care- 

 fully prepared plan. 



A season's work in the garden may be 

 likened to two armies fighting for victory. 

 In the gardener's case, one army stands for 

 contrary weather, blight, bugs and other 

 foes of plant life — those are the opposing 

 forces. The friendly forces are good 

 soil, sunshine and rain in modera- 

 tion, good tools and lots of enthusi- 

 asm. Work out your plans to meet 

 all emergencies. 



Planning the garden will divide the 

 army of backyard gardeners into two 

 camps. One side will want to lay 

 out the garden for successive crops, 

 digging a little and planting a little, 

 then digging a little more and so on. 

 It wants things to come along nicely 

 and easily without too strenuous a 

 start. I believe the majority of back- 

 yard gardeners prefer this course. 



The others will want to "make gar- 

 den" once for all, and be done with it. 

 They want the ground dug or plowed on 

 Monday, raked on Tuesday and planted on 

 Wednesday. Both ask for the same re- 

 turns — fresh vegetables all season — and 

 strangely, both can be accommodated, 



APPLYING THE PRINCIPLES OF "INTENSIVE 

 CULTIVATION" SO AS TO OBTAIN THE MAXI- 

 MUM SERVICES FROM THE LAND — CROP 

 ROTATIONS FOR THE SMALL YARD AND 

 WHAT IT REALLY MEANS — HOW THE BUSY 

 MAN MAY PLANT HIS GARDEN "ALL AT 

 ONCE" AND STILL HAVE SUCCESSION CROPS 



The tomato patch can also be used as the radish 

 bed early in the season 



though slightly different courses of pro- 

 cedure are necessary in each case. 



LAYING OUT FOR SUCCESSIVE CROPS 



Take a tablet, get a rule and mark out 

 the boundary lines of your garden. From 

 your seed supply sort out the "hardiest" 

 of your vegetables (such as radishes, let- 

 tuce, spinach, onion sets, etc.), and mark 

 out a section of your garden for them. 

 Next, sort out your less hardy vegetables 

 (beans, wrinkled peas, sweet corn, etc.). 

 Set aside another section for these and be 

 sure to indicate rows for each as you go 

 along. Finally, mark up rows and hills 

 for the "tender" vegetables (including 

 cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, etc.). 



Your garden will thus stand divided in 

 three sections. Now, for some scheming! 

 Don't try to plant all the available space 

 in section one to hardy vegetables all at 

 once! Plant a 15-foot row of each kind 



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The working chart for my vegetable garden showing how successions are 

 planned 



this week, another next week, etc., until 

 you see an adequate supply coming on. 

 In the meantime, remember that that part 

 of the garden set aside for "tender" 

 vegetables will not be utilized until the 

 end of May. Between April 15th and the 



91 



end of May there are six weeks in which 

 that piece of ground will grow spinach, 

 onions and radishes to good size. 

 If you can, therefore, get the piece, 

 called section three, dug while you are 

 planting section one, so much the better. 

 Since all "tender" plants are relatively 

 small up to June 15th, I have often grown 

 two crops of radishes and green onions 

 and a good crop of big head lettuce (May 

 King) in the "tender" section of my garden. 

 Another consideration: by the end of 

 May, some rows in the "hardy" section 

 will have stopped bearing and the space 

 is available for another crop. 



Crop rotation in plain English is the 

 science of never planting the same vege- 

 table in the same row twice in succession. 

 The reasons for this are obvious. Every 

 vegetable extracts nourishment from the 

 soil in form of certain elements. Each 

 crop also seems to put into the soil some- 

 thing that reacts against that same crop. 

 Different vegetables require, as a rule, 

 different elements. You can, therefore, 

 sow radishes in a given row; pull them 

 out and sow the row to peas; pull 

 out the peas and plant cucumbers as 

 a third crop in the one row in one 

 season, and all without detriment to 

 either crop or to the soil. 



But don't follow beans by beans, 

 lettuce by lettuce and don't set your 

 tomato plants on the piece of ground 

 on which you had them last year. 

 To do so is to invite disaster. There 

 is just one exception to this rule — 

 onions; these you may sow on the 

 same piece of ground for a number 

 of years without any detriment to 

 the crop. And occasionally, accord- 

 ing to local conditions tomatoes, etc., 

 may succeed themselves for several sea- 

 sons without apparent effect, but sooner or 

 later — look out. 



My model for a plan worked out for a 

 proper succession of crops and crop rota- 

 tion is shown in the sketch. 



