132 
GARDENS AND THEIR MEANING 
leaves are not used for food, the treatment is simple enough, 
but great caution must be used to prevent scattering poison 
on the leaves of plants that are to be eaten as greens or 
salad, lest sad results follow. 
The treatment for sucking insects — the bugs — is, how- 
ever, different. These escape death by poison because they 
drink deep, and so some way must be found to choke or to 
smother them. This is accomplished by spraying with an 
emulsion of kerosene, combined sometimes with whale-oil 
soap. Hand spraying with a quart-size atomizer is not hard. 
Yet, after all, in a small garden nothing is so effective as 
doing the work by hand ; this means picking off the pests 
or shaking them into a jar of kerosene, being careful not 
to let one escape. 
It helps wonderfully to be able to recognize at a glance the 
common insects in each of their various stages, to watch for 
them both above and below ground, and if possible to outwit 
their strategy. This again is in line with the work of the 
experiment stations. A pair of butterflies, for instance, whirl 
about on a sunshiny morning, dancing like fairies with their 
pale, spotted wings. Where did they come from Less than 
a month before, each dainty creature was an egg, belonging, 
in fact, to a cluster of hundreds of tiny eggs that had been 
skillfully gummed upon the under side of a juicy cabbage 
leaf. Not many days elapsed before a transformation took 
place and the eggs hatched into caterpillars, soft and green. 
Coming into a rich inheritance of new cabbage, each little 
caterpillar promptly began chewing its way into the crisp 
inner leaves. Its span of life is, in fact, largely passed in this 
land of plenty, first in the caterpillar and then in the chrysalis 
stage, where it rests awhile before coming out a butterfly. 
Twice a year, at least, new broods of cabbage caterpillars are 
hatched from eggs. The canny farmer will of course not 
