94 
House & Garden’s 
THE FOUR STAGES of the GARDEN 
A Graphic Portrayal of What Cross Sections of the Vegetable Area Should Be at 
Monthly Intervals During the Active Growing Season 
V ISUALIZING a whole vegetable garden 
is no easy task—real visualizing, that is, 
in which a worm’s-eye as well as a bird’s-eye 
view of each and all the rows is presented. 
Difficult as is the undertaking, however, it 
must be attempted if you would have a garden 
of one hundred per cent productiveness, for the 
simple reason that all of the ground must be 
kept working all of the time. There must be 
no waste of either time or space. To accom¬ 
plish this a knowledge of each row’s condition 
throughout the season is essential; hence the 
necessity for visualizing. 
All this may seem an unnecessary sort of ex¬ 
ploitation of orderliness, but those who have 
had much experience in gardening know the 
dire consequences of trying to raise vegetables 
on a hit-or-miss plan. Not only does the dis¬ 
ordered garden spell small yields and waste of 
seed as well as space, but its very disarray puts 
a premium on neglect. One cannot take much 
pride in a tangle of beans, carrots and com 
interlaced with pea vines and weeds, nor gather 
full crops from its jungle depths. Disease and 
insect pests flourish unchecked in such a gar¬ 
den, too often extending their depredations to 
the neighbor’s domain across the fence and 
causing him unwarranted loss. 
In depicting garden layouts the usual method 
is to show a ground plan of the arrangement 
as it appears from above. However detailed 
and explanatory such plans may be they are 
not really graphic—they lack the worm’s-eye 
perspective. In an attempt to overcome their 
deficiencies the garden chart shown here was 
developed. 
Imagine, for the moment, that it is May 15th 
and that you are looking simultaneously at the 
topmost horizontal line of the chart on this 
page and down the rows of your vegetable gar- 
den-as-it-should-be. You are facing the south, 
with the east at your left and at your right 
the west, because the planted rows run north 
and south for the sake of an even distribution 
of sunlight through the day. Thus placed you 
can see only the first plant in each row, but 
others are beyond, extending in orderly lines 
for 50' or more like soldiers standing at atten¬ 
tion in “company front.” 
Beginning at the left or east end of the gar¬ 
den, then, you notice that the first 18" of space 
(each of the vertical divisions of the chart rep¬ 
resents T) are unoccupied. Then comes the 
first row—pole bean seedlings under portable 
glass forcers, for the season is early yet and 
beans need heat. Another 18" to the west is a 
row of onion sets, and next to it, at the same 
distance, the pole limas, also under glass. Spin¬ 
ach, young tomato plants and the rest follow in 
their order and at proper intervals as you fol¬ 
low the line to the west end of the garden, 100' 
away at the right side of page 95. The late 
peas and much of the main corn crop do not 
show above ground as yet, for they have just 
been planted. Throughout the whole 100' you 
will notice that the spacing of the rows depends 
upon such points as cultivation requirements, 
the size and habit of the mature plants, and the 
length of the period through which they occupy 
the ground. 
One month later, on the line below, growth 
has correspondingly advanced. The first spin¬ 
ach, radishes, cabbage, cauliflower, peas, beets, 
lettuce, turnip, kohlrabi and carrots are ready 
for use, and within the next month their places 
will usually be taken either by succession plant¬ 
ings or sowings of late season crops. In the 
cases of the onion row between the pole beans 
and the limas, the spinach between the limas 
and the tomatoes, and the radishes between 
the two rows of tomatoes, the growth of the 
flanking vegetables is such that by July 15th 
it heavily shades the intervening spaces. For 
this reason intercrops are chosen which will 
