I HOUSE AND GARDEN 
204 
May, 1910 
1 
Fertilizers 
The purpose of this page is to set forth in the most direct, non-tecb- 
nical form the fundamental principles of amateur gardening. Unlike the 
great mass of garden literature, it presupposes no knowledge of the subject, 
aiming to satisfy those who now for the first time want to know how to make 
things grow. The Editor will welcome any questions from beginners and 
will print in these columns the experience of contributors when they seem 
to have a wide appeal. 
I T is astonishing that such 
a measure of good luck 
attends the guesses which 
most of us make at supply¬ 
ing the needs of the soil —or 
to be more exact, the needs of 
the plants which grow in the 
soil -because very few really 
know anything about it. But 
of course the makers of com¬ 
mercial fertilizers have 
helped us greatly, and there 
are many scientifically com¬ 
pounded and of real value, 
upon the market, every pound 
accompanied with directions 
for its application to the 
soil. What these compounds 
do, however, and why they do 
it, and why it needs doing are 
details of the matter that* 
even very advanced gard¬ 
eners do not trouble to 
concern themselves with— 
at least not often. The gen¬ 
eral idea is to make the soil 
“rich,” and if one thing 
doesn’t produce a crop luxu¬ 
riant enough to indicate that 
this has been accomplished, 
something else is tried—some¬ 
thing that is hit upon somehow, 
somewhere, that somebody 
says is good because it has 
benefited some other garden. 
Of course everybody knows that the 
growth of a plant requires food just as 
much as the growth of a child or a 
bird or anything else in creation requires 
food. But the ideas about this food 
are very vague; “what plants eat” is 
an untold tale, mysterious, almost chi¬ 
merical to the practical mind accustomed 
to seeing before believing. Let us see 
if we can’t straighten this out a little 
and come to a real comprehension of 
plant feeding; then fertilizers will not 
seem so deadly dull and uninteresting 
and incomprehensible. 
The food of plants consists of thirteen 
“chemical elements.” Nine of these 
are taken by the plant directly from the 
soil -these are the pure mineral plant 
foods, three are taken from water and 
from air, and the thirteenth and last is 
taken principally from decaying organic 
matter in the soil. 
In order to understand this quite 
clearly let us stop just here long enough 
to take a look at the second classification 
of soil as mentioned in a preceding instal¬ 
ment of the Beginner's Garden —that is, 
the chemical classification. Soil is made 
up of mineral matter and organic matter - 
two forms that are of course widely 
different—and to get at this composition 
of it in the simplest way possible we will 
follow the suggestion of one of the Depart¬ 
ment of Agriculture experts and magnify 
a cubic inch of soil, in the imagination, to 
a cubic mile—and then look it over. It 
becomes very vivid, and the processes 
going on in it are plainly revealed, under 
such examination. 
It will look like a mass of rocks and 
stones varying from the size of a pea to 
boulders several feet in diameter. These 
are the mineral particles —in common 
parlance the “dirt"—which predominate 
and form the foundation of all soil. 
Among these rocks and stones, in many of 
their large and small interstices, will be 
decaying pieces of plant roots and stems 
and other organic matter which appear 
very much like logs and pieces of logs 
rotting among masses of rock and gravel. 
All of this organic substance will be drip¬ 
ping with water like a soaked sponge, 
while all the stones and rocks have a layer 
of water over their surfaces. And finally, 
in all the spaces where there is noth¬ 
ing else, there is air — indeed nearly 
half the volume of the whole cubic mile 
is air. 
A plant root coming down into this 
magnified cubic inch of soil would be of 
course an enormous thing, pushing its 
way among the rocks and stones and de¬ 
caying matter with agreat, tireless, steady, 
resistless pressure that would move 
the biggest of them. Near the tip of 
this ever-extending and down-reaching 
growth, small hollow tubes—root hairs — 
would be seen reaching out and feeling 
this way and that, sucking the water from 
the surfaces of the rocks and from the 
dripping, spongy masses among them by 
drawing it through their thin and delicate 
walls. 
In this water is the mineral food, 
dissolved off in the minutest particles 
from the “rocks”—and it is somewhat 
staggering to note, by the way, that in 
order to produce one pound 
of growth in dry matter — - 
that is in branch and leaf, 
flower and fruit —from 300 to 
800 pounds of water must be 
taken in by a plant’s roots, 
drawn up through its stalks 
and branches, and discharged 
or “transpired ” by its leaves! 
Think of the stupendous 
work being carried on by all 
the silent green things that 
we give scarce a thought to in 
the long, drowsy summer 
days. 
All fertilizers present, in 
different forms, three essen¬ 
tials—phosphoric acid, potash 
and nitrogen. The latter is 
the last of those thirteen 
chemical elements mentioned 
which feed vegetation — the 
one which comes principally 
from decaying organic matter 
in the soil—and in some re¬ 
spects it is the most import¬ 
ant of all. Unfortunately it 
is the one most easily lost 
through washing out, nitrates 
being very soluble, or ex¬ 
hausted in other ways; there¬ 
fore it is the one which 
should be applied only in suf¬ 
ficient quantity for the imme¬ 
diate use of the plants to be 
grown, and just at the proper time for 
their needs. It is usually well to wait 
until they are above the ground. 
Surplus phosphoric acid and potash, 
on the contrary, will usually remain in the 
soil until succeeding crops use them up, 
so it does not matter so much if these are 
applied in excess. They are not wasted. 
What is known as a complete fer¬ 
tilizer is a combination of these three 
in the proportion generally of one part 
nitrogen,two parts phosphoric acid and two 
and one-half to three parts potash. Such a 
fertilizer will meet all the requirements of 
the average garden, especially if the soil 
is treated as directed in a previous number, 
with lime first. Lime is not a fertilizer 
in the strictest sense, but it sweetens 
the soil as well as helps to bring about 
physical and other changes that make 
plant food available. 
The sources of each of these three 
fertilizer ingredients are important to 
know and remember, for even though a 
complete commercial product that just 
suits one’s garden is found, it is well to 
have an intelligent understanding of its 
composition. Many times the application 
of one of the three is all that is needed and 
where this is the case it is much better to 
use only the one—for gorging the soil is 
as bad as starving it. 
Nitrogen is supplied by nitrate of soda, 
sulphate of ammonia, cotton-seed meal, 
high-grade dried blood, or green manuring 
(a leguminous crop such as cow peas, 
clover of all kinds, soy beans and others, 
grown and plowed under), and by stable 
(Continued on page xvii) 
