Two Vegetable Gardens. 
I have in mind two farmers who lived 
side by side, yet who practiced very differ¬ 
ent methods of gardening. One put all his 
small plants in beds about tw’enty feet long 
and six feet wide, sowing crosswise the 
beds in rows eight or nine inches apart. 
These beds were laid out with scrupulous 
exactness, were raised a few inches above 
the surrounding surface, and the seeds 
were sown by kneeling on a narrow board 
placed across the bed. A bed of the size 
mentioned contained from 150 to 180 feet of 
rows. The whole garden was laid out in a 
style in keeping with the beds. It was a 
little square enclosure, where a horse was 
never known except in the spring plowing. 
The corners were spaded up. This farmer, 
whom we will designate as A, was known 
to have had his garden in that same place 
for at least fifteen years. 
Adjoining lived farmer B, who "was 
known to be fickle in regard to the location 
of his garden, for every two or three years 
he would remove it to some new part ot 
the farm. He selected a loamy and well- 
subdued strip along a cornfield u a potato 
patch. He sowed all his vegetables, even 
his onions and radishes, in rows twenty 
inches or more apart. He did all his culti¬ 
vation by horse. 
Passing from A’s garden one sultry July 
day, I saw a boy endeavoring to weed a bed 
of onions. Nearly all the work had to be 
done with the fingers, and the btd was 
hard to get at. It was too'wide to allow 
the boy to reach to the middle convenient¬ 
ly, and the space between the rows were so 
narrow, and the plants had grown so large, 
that he could not easily stand in the rows. 
Moreover such an undertaking would likely 
have marred the beauty of the bed. I found 
by inquiry that the onions were then being 
weeded the fourth time, and that still 
another operation would be needed. Each 
weeding “spoiled a half a day.” Perhaps 
the boy put little spirit in his work; there is 
not commonly as much incentive to dili¬ 
gence in snch an onion patch with a July sun 
beating upon one’s back in a sultry, tucked 
up garden as there is behind a horse in 
long rows and a cooler soil. The boy de- 
i 
dared that two day’s work had already 
been spent upon that onion patch. Scarcely 
less had been spent upon other parts of the 
garden of no greater area. Each individ¬ 
ual cabbage and tomato plant had to be 
surrounded soon after it made its appear¬ 
ance by a cylinder of sized paper to keep 
off cut-worms, The radishes were nearly 
always wonny, and the cabbages and tur¬ 
nips were lousy. Nearly every season the 
garden suffered from drought, and as for 
weeds, “Mr. B’s garden was nowhere.” 
I soon after saw farmer B’s garden. It 
was a marvel of thrift and tidiness. I 
learned that probably less than half a day 
had been spent on three rows of vegetables 
eight rods long. By comparing the two 
gardens, it was plain that the drought, the 
weeds and the numbers of insects in A’s- 
garden were due to his method of cultiva¬ 
tion and to the repeated growing of the 
same variety of plants upon that one piece 
of ground. The products of these two gar¬ 
dens, as I learned later in the season, were 
as dissimilar in size and quantities as their 
methods of treatment were unlike. In A’s 
garden the soil was well nigh exhausted 
for gardening purposes, although manure 
was each year applied in abundance. Far¬ 
mer B told me that he always had in his 
cellar an abundance of fresh vegetables, 
while farmer A complained there was little 
use in trying to grow vegetables on the 
farm, since it was cheaper to buy them.— 
L. H. Burley, Jr., in American Cultivator . 
Fertilizers vs Manures. 
BY THOMAS D. BAIRD. 
While we would insist on the farmer 
using every means possible to accumulate 
and preserve all the manure of every char¬ 
acter on his farm, yet when he has to buy 
to manure his crops, I believe he will find 
it greatly to his advantage to buy artificial 
fertilizers. I know their concentrated 
character has caused heretofore some prej¬ 
udice against them, because one who has 
been used to spreading on his land ten or 
twenty loads of bulky barn-yard manure, 
could scarcely believe that two hundred 
pounds of the fertilizer contained as much 
of the elements of plant food, as a two- 
