tiie amateur’s kitchen garden. 
23 
Earth-work is generally well understood by the class likely 
to be employed in the rougher kinds of garden labour. We 
shall suppose the reader to regard the handling of the spade 
as infra dig., and this will save expenditure of space in de- 
scribing the noble art of turning the turf topsy-turvy. It 
will soon be discovered by the observant amateur that human 
nature has a greater liking for scratching than for digging, 
and hence to ensure for a piece of ground what a gardener 
would call a “good doing” is not an easy matter. But there 
is great virtue in stirring, notwithstanding Hood’s assertion 
that it is the action of a spoon. It is rather the exception 
than the rule for the kitchen garden to be as deeply stirred 
and knocked about as it ought to be. Ordinary flat digging 
answers for most crops, but a certain extent of ground ought 
every year to be trenched, so that in the course of five or six 
years or so, all the plots devoted to rotation cropping may be 
turned over to the depth of two spits. If the crop to be put 
on will allow of it, a good body of manure should be put in 
the trench, between the two spits, as the work proceeds, but it 
may be advisable to put the manure at the bottom of the 
trench below both spits, or to trench without manure and 
finish by pricking in a coat of manure on the top. If gigan- 
tic parsnips, carrots, and salsify are wanted, put the manure at 
the bottom ; if fine peas, beans, cauliflowers, broccolis, and 
cabbages are your desire, put the manure between the two 
spits; if the ground is intended for a seed bed, prick the 
manure into the top crust about half a spit deep. It is a 
common experience of those who enter into possession of old 
gardens to find the growth of everything stunted and the soil 
apparently worn out. Nine times in ten, or even ninety-nine 
times in a hundred, when this is the case, the land may be 
rendered capable of almost anything by the simple process of 
trenching and putting a good body of fat manure between the 
two spits. In all probability the kind of tillage that has been 
followed has been founded on scratching instead of digging, 
and hence the second spit, perhaps the whole body, of soil 
from a depth of six inches downward is in the state of maiden 
earth, never touched by plough or spade, with all the elements 
of fertility still locked up in it as in the times far back when 
the soil was made by the deposition of grain upon grain at the 
bottom of the sea. As the value of trenching depends on 
the quality of the subsoil, it follows of course that where the 
subsoil consists of unkind stuff it may not be advisable to 
