HOUSE AND GARDEN 
m2 
March, 1915 
When preparing the raw soil for planting in a small garden, the first operation is to lay a main 
drain beneath where the path is to run. If the water table is right, it will be permanent 
own, such as T had enjoyed 
as a boy, would not be stilled, 
and when I finally settled 
down, I determined that my 
three boys would have the 
same sort of;': big suburban 
place to grow tip in as I did. 
Alas, but the country had 
changed in those twenty 
years! In my native town, as 
in thousands of them like it 
near big cities on the Eastern 
seaboard, those fine old es¬ 
tates had all been cut up by 
the real estate men into little 
50 x 100 -ft. lots, with scarcely 
breathing room between the 
houses. Even the Governor's 
mansion, with its twenty acres 
of gardens and grounds, was 
now reduced to a bare two 
hundred square feet of land; 
Van Wyck house, with its 
noble avenue of pines, its box gardens and 
stately lawns—swept away utterly, not a trace 
of it to be found. The Kearney place—trying 
to look smug and respectable on fifty feet of 
front for all its sprawling, one-story wavs; 
our own place—what! was this it! this big, 
high-gambrel roof, flanked closely by squat, 
“Queen Anne’’ cottages of nondescript archi¬ 
tecture?—It was to weep! 
After much search, I found a place 50 miles 
from the city, on the Atlantic coast, in a fine, 
hardwood forest, where a development com¬ 
pany had put through a magnificent road sys¬ 
tem with cement sidewalks, water, gas and 
sewer. 
Labor conditions had also changed since my 
early garden days. No longer could you put 
up a small house and get a man to live in it and 
garden for you for a percentage of the total and 
his rent. Now they want all this and wages 
To determine the water table height, the bottom of the drain should start a foot below 
soil level. Note the sub-surface water level. This seepage should be run off to 
avoid sogginess 
besides, which immediately makes the country place an 
expensive luxury, instead of a self-sustaining property. 
I foresaw that I would have to do all the gardening my¬ 
self, and that, too, in the scant spare time permitted to 
a busy commuter; so I estimated that about an acre 
was all I could manage properly. And, as this acre 
was wild forest, which had to be cleared and tamed, I 
started on but one-third of it, leaving the rest in park 
for future years. 
It’s a heartrending business, this cutting down beauti¬ 
ful forest trees, but it has to be done if you are going 
to find room and sunlight for a garden and fruit trees. 
The diagram shows the original layout of house, barn, 
garden and shrubbery. We left about twenty-five 
forest trees on the place — four of them on the garden 
site — as I did not believe at the time of planning that 
the sun has a very different declination in winter than 
in summer, and I had read somewhere that the sun’s 
declination was 20 degrees, so I concluded that the 
shadows of these trees would fall back of the garden 
on the forest. This theory the sun seemed to amply 
uphold — in February — for, even at mid-day, it seemed 
hardly over the southern hori¬ 
zon. As a matter of fact, in 
midsummer the shadows of 
these trees fell directly below 
them at high noon, robbing 
the plants beneath of their 
sunlight, and I took all of 
them out the next year. 
I did not realize that much 
of my boyhood success came 
from excellently prepared 
soil, well drained, well mel¬ 
lowed and well fertilized. 
This had all been done by my 
elders, leaving me nothing but 
planting and fighting weeds to 
insure success. In reality, my 
forest soil, even after stump¬ 
ing, clearing of roots and 
adding a thin top-dressing of 
field soil, was as sour as un¬ 
told centuries of shade and 
forest leaf-fall could make it. 
Go 
The original vegetable layout had too much of everything and not enough of anything. The plan shows the 
feasibility of a wheel-hoe garden 
