io OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING 
clime and soil; of lack of knowledge and of numbers; 
of poverty, of sickness, and of hostile savages. Wil¬ 
liam Bradford describes the gathering in of “the small 
harvest they had” during the autumn of 1621, after 
their first summer in the new world, and tells of the 
precautions which they took for their second winter, 
mindful of the horrors of their first. The proposition 
to enclose the settlement was approved and “this was 
accomplished very cherfully and the towne Impayled 
round by the beginning of March, In which every fam¬ 
ily had a prety garden plott secured.” The next 
summer—their second—every family was assigned a 
parcel of land for planting of corn, every man for him¬ 
self that there might be abundance for another year. 
And “the women now wente willingly into the feild, 
and tooke their litle ones with them to set come.” 
Governor Winslow, writing to the mother country 
in the same year, says that corn proved well but “our 
pease not worth the gathering, for we feared they were 
too late sown. They came up very well and blos¬ 
somed; but the sun parched them in the blossom.” 
What discouragement! Yet he makes no complaint, 
and after describing the fruits with which Nature has 
supplied them—“all the spring time the earth sendeth 
naturally very good sallet herbs. Here are grapes, 
white and red, and very sweet and strong also; straw¬ 
berries, gooseberries, raspas, &c., plums of three sorts, 
