HOUSE AND GARDEN 
■79 I 
May, 1910 
and seat; also plain colors 
in any suitable furniture 
material; as well as velours 
and silk in delicate color¬ 
ings. A special chair in¬ 
tended for summer use is 
made of straight lengths of 
willow, not interwoven, 
which is intended for use 
without cushions. It is 
unusually comfortable and 
seems to conform to the 
shape of any body. The 
chairs made with wide 
spaces between the willow 
sticks are the most artistic, 
but the close and more 
expensive weave is per¬ 
haps more durable. 
Great comfortable couches are made of these materials, strong 
enough to hold the heaviest of men, and some of them are now 
constructed with box springs, instead of having the regulation 
cushions. This form for the porch sleeper should prove invaluable. 
This table of whole and split willow, 
in a convenient bedroom size costs 
$12.50 
A unique suggestion for 
a bungalow or cottage bed¬ 
room is to use this light 
woven furniture throughout. 
Single beds, fitted with 
comfortable box springs, 
make a change from the 
ever-present brass bed, and 
can be constructed at rea¬ 
sonable price. Beds are 
not among the stock articles 
furnished by the dealer, 
but any worker who has 
made the heavy couches 
can fashion a very satis¬ 
factory bed when supplied 
with a good design. Dainty 
desks may be had in various 
patterns; straight-backed, 
easy and high or low rocking chairs; dressing tables; waist and 
shoe boxes; couches; swings; tea wagons; smoking chairs; 
tables of varied design; dining chairs; high-chairs; muffin stands; 
anything, in fact, that one could want. 
A pocket chair is a great piazza conve¬ 
nience, costing $6.50 as here or with 
two pockets 
Grow Your Own Vegetables 
IV. THE IMPORTANCE OF FREQUENT AND REGULAR CULTIVATION OF THE GROUND 
TO KEEP DOWN THE WEEDS AND TO HELP THE SOIL TO RETAIN MOISTURE 
by F. F. Rockwell 
[This is the fourth of a series of articles which will cover in a thorough and practical way the subject of amateur vegetable gardening. The aim is 
to furnish the information covering every detail of what to do and in such a form that it will be clear to the very beginner just how to do it. Each article 
and its tabular data will give the information needed at the time of its publication, so as not to confuse the home-gardenei with an overwhelming quantity 
of detail ; that is, the reader will learn what is to be done at the proper time for doing that particular thing. Those who follow the suggestions made, 
from the selection of seed to the storing of winter vegetables, may confidently expect a successful garden .— EDITOR.] 
T HE experienced planter does not need to be told very much 
about keeping his garden clean. He knows that if his crops 
are cultivated as they should be the weeds will never have a chance 
to get a start. The frequent stirring of the soil so essential to 
the best growth of plant life, if it is thoroughly attended to, makes 
the matter of keeping down weeds a side issue. 
There is an enemy much more insidious than 
Weeds, which must be fought to a finish by the 
gardener who hopes to be successful. It is 
crusted soil, that keeps out air; crusted soil, 
that lets out water. And yet the Weed bugaboo 
is so thoroughy fixed in the general horticultural 
imagination that 1 have had to use “weeds” in 
the title of this article, rather than risk scaring 
readers away with such an abstruse statement 
as “Cultivate to conserve soil moisture'” 
Plants need to breathe. Their roots need 
air. You might as well expect to find the rosy 
glow of happiness on the pale cheeks of a cotton- 
mill child slave, as to expect to see the luxuriant 
dark green of healthy plant life in your suffo¬ 
cated garden. You will look in vain — and then 
most likely turn away from your meagre and 
tasteless crops, prematurely in the sere and yellow 
leaf, and say unpleasant things about those 
deceptive magazines which inveigled you into 
venturing upon the sea of horticulture. The 
fault will be your own — the trouble not with the 
sea but with your leaking boat. Admit air to the 
To produce large, healthy veg¬ 
etables keep the ground cul¬ 
tivated so that it will never 
show crusted soil 
roots of your plants by frequent cultivation. Though the leaves 
are really their lungs, still the root system requires also a cer¬ 
tain amount of air, just as you would suffocate to death if your 
pores were all tightly closed. 
There is another reason why the surface of your garden, 
especially about the plants, should be broken 
up, and be kept broken up, sufficiently to admit 
air freely. The food for plants, to a large extent, 
has to be what we may call predigested, that is, 
supplied in a very assimilable form, especially 
for some of the quick-maturing crops. The chief 
ingredients of plant food (nitrogen, phosphoric 
acid and potash) may be in the soil in abundance, 
but unless they are there in a form ready to be 
assimilated easily by the feeding roots of the 
plant, it may starve, on the principle that one 
would not grow very fat on a diet of frozen 
meat and vegetables. Air and water are both 
necessary to “convert”, as the gentlemen with 
spectacles say, this raw plant food to a form in 
which the plants can use it. But long before 
they made their discovery, the man with the hoe 
observed that he must keep the soil nicely loos¬ 
ened about his growing crops, and that water 
was necessary, if they were to do well. Even the 
lanky and untutored aborigine saw to it that his 
squaw not only put a bad fish under the hill of 
maize, but plied her shell hoe over it. 
Important as the question of air is, that of 
