SEEDS AND SOWING 



AS there can be no successful garden without proper 

 knowledge of the soil, neither can there be a 

 good garden without some knowledge of seeds. The 

 gardener can never hope to know in a lifetime as 

 much about these tiny mysteries as a little honest 

 attention will teach him about dirt, to be sure; still 

 there is much to learn; much that may be learned and 

 a little that must. Let us take this last — this neces- 

 sity — first into consideration. 



In planting seeds the inexperienced usually err 

 on the side of thoroughness, burying them beneath a 

 weight of earth that promptly smothers all their aspira- 

 tions. There is a certain amount of energy stored 

 in a seed — enough to reproduce the plant from which 

 it came — but not enough to do more than this; not 

 enough to move many times its own weight of earth 

 aside in order to do its work. Hopelessly they give 

 up the ghost and go the way of all dead things, instead 

 of the way of the living — and the gardener grumbles, 

 when he has only himself to blame. 



15 



