HOUSE AND GARDEN 
248 
April, 1915 
it, and all the tender vegetables had to go in without delay. On 
May 1st the corn went in, a shovelful of manure to each hill, 
Early Metropolitan, Country Gentleman and Golden Bantam 
being the sorts selected. A few days later the first three rows 
(75 feet) of string beans went in, and on May /th 1 set out the 
tomato plants. Get a dozen little plants seeded in a grape basket, 
25 cents a basket, and transplant direct to the hills, taking out 
with a narrow trowel with the earth still caked about the roots. 
Twenty of these filled the allotted tomato space, and the other 
four (from two baskets) I found space for in the rear border, 
where they grew 
and luxuriated and 
gave endless 
t r o u b 1 e, falling 
over on currants 
and asparagus 
plants. May 10th 
I planted the lima 
beans, with a shov¬ 
elful of manure in 
each hill for good 
meas u r e. They 
should be planted 
eight to a hill, eyes 
down. I used pole 
limas, because the 
yield is very much 
greater per foot of 
ground than with 
bush limas, and 
poles were easy to 
get in the sur¬ 
rounding forest. I 
left the saplings 
full length and bent their tops over, lash¬ 
ing them together to make rustic arches. 
These bean arches were soon covered 
with luxuriant vines, and formed a ver¬ 
itable bower of beans, with the big pods 
pendant inside the roof of the bower. 
Picking them in midsummer was a most 
Arcadian occupation, sitting in the shade, 
forsooth, on a low stepladder, with the 
market basket on your arm and ready 
scissors to snip off the abundant crop 
withal! By the middle of May I had the 
eggplants set out, a dozen little, potted 
seedlings bought at the seedman's (36 
cents). They need the richest kind of 
soil, so I chose the site of one of the for¬ 
mer manure piles, and set them out 2j4 feet apart, 2/2 feet in 
the row. They came up like balloons, and we had trouble enough 
in September trying to eat all the big, purple eggplant fruits as 
fast as they got ripe. 
The hotbed population was now clamoring to be set out, so, 
“partner,” who presides over our flowers and shrubbery, took her 
pansies, cosmos and hollyhocks away, and I set out 72 young 
lettuce plants for heading. To get crisp, tender lettuce you want 
a rich, mellow soil, for slow-growing lettuce is alzvays tough, so 
I gave it a bed alongside the eggplant, where the proportion of 
manure to soil was very great. 
It was now time for second sowings of stringless beans, third 
of peas and radishes, and we were already having our first radishes 
and lettuce. The weeds also began to be noticeable, so I manned 
the wheel-hoe, and in half an hour had weeded that whole garden, 
all but the beds, which took an hour each. All these hours (I 
might add in parentheses) were snatched here and there; morn¬ 
ings, evenings and Saturdays, before and after business hours. 
They represented my physical exercise, my concession to the 
needs of the Unexercised Middle Third, which too often among 
11s Americans degenerates into an unearned increment around the 
waist line! So long as it isn’t Undeserved Excruciation of the 
Backbone, I have no objection to gardening as exercise, and the 
wheel-hoe has emancipated us from those sore and aching back¬ 
bones which always overtook the Man with the Hoe in the old- 
style weeding days. You put on one or both of the hoes and walk 
up and down the rows of vegetables, 
shoving the wheel-hoe ahead of you in a 
series of short pushes. Good for chest 
and arm muscle development. The keen, 
little hoe scrapes along, half an inch below 
the surface, cutting the root of every weed 
in its path. Its curved, inner face just 
grazes the line of vegetables, and a cast- 
iron pointer going on before lifts the vege¬ 
table leaves out of the way of the wheel. 
If your row was not planted to a line (by 
eye-guess, let us say), and is seeded 
crookedly, woe will be yours, for the 
wheel-hoe is no respecter of aristocratic 
vegetables, and cuts off plants and tares 
alike. If sown to a garden line, or, better 
still, by the seed¬ 
ing attachment of 
the wheel-hoe (if 
you can afford it, 
get one: it saves 
m any a weary 
back), you will 
shear a straight 
line, passing with¬ 
in an inch of the 
vegetable stems, 
and you will have 
hardly a weed to 
pull out between 
the plants where 
the wheel-hoe can¬ 
not reach. 
The strawberry 
bed now began to 
attract attention 
for miles around. 
It was not only a 
mass of big, dark- 
green leaves, but a 
veritable snow-bank of the white and yellow flowers. Our beets, 
spinach and turnips, which were sown very heavily, required im¬ 
mediate thinning, and by early June we began eating a supply of 
fresh “greens” from these thinnings that never seemed to give 
out. One day it would be beet tops, the next young spinach, the 
next little, fresh turnips, creamed. Counting in radishes and 
strawberries for breakfast, a head of lettuce a day, and a dish of 
greens and peas for dinner, the June yield of the garden figured 
at about 70 cents a day, which is $21.00 in a month, or $126 in 
six months, in return for a few loads of manure and some spare 
time—this for the benefit of that wiseacre who insists that gar¬ 
dening never pays in cold dollars and cents, even while he admits 
that the garden things are very nice and fresh, and all that. It 
does pay, at the prevailing cost of high living. 
July saw the stringless beans, early turnips and second peas 
(Continued on page 276) 
