42 
House & Garde 
MAKING THE NEW GARDEN 
How to Get Good Results the First Season in Your New Flower 
or Vegetable Garden, Hardy Border or Rose Planting 
'^''HERE is a commonly accepted belief 
X that good results cannot be counted on 
from your new garden the first season. This 
idea has sprung from the fact that first-year 
gardens are generally not as good as older 
ones. But this is, in most cases, because the 
gardener has not carefully analyzed the 
problem he had to meet. From force of 
habit, in nine cases out of ten, the new gar¬ 
den is prepared in practically the same way 
as one that has been in use several years. To 
get tlie best results, however, the preparation 
should be quite radically dift’erent. 
The characteristics of any soil which most 
directly affect its fertility are its physical 
condition; the amounts of available plant 
food; the humus contained in it; the degree 
of inoculation by certain “friendly” or help¬ 
ful bacteria; and the amount of moisture 
contained. These are the factors—some¬ 
what prosaic, perhaps, but nevertheless all 
important—which determine whether you 
will have big roses and plenty of them, asters 
that you can cut by the armful, sweet peas 
as high as your head, tender and juicy beets 
and plump tomatoes, or struggling, half- 
starved, scrawny flowers and vegetables that 
will demand the apology from you to every 
visiting friend that this is only a “flrst-year 
garden, so don’t be hard on it.” 
To get at the root of the matter, let us 
make a comparison between the new soil and 
the old and see what can be done to improve 
the former and make it more productive. 
New Soil versus Old 
First there is the question of physical con¬ 
dition. If you dig down about a foot or so 
into the soil of an old garden, and then do 
likewise in the soil of a new garden, three 
things will at once strike your attention. 
First, on the old ground the top layer or sur¬ 
face soil is very much deeper; secondly, you 
will notice that it falls apart and crumbles 
into much smaller pieces, being compara¬ 
tively free from large lumps, or, if there are 
any, they break up easily into small, crumb¬ 
like particles under a blow from the spade or 
fork; and thirdly, the color and character of 
the soil are quite distinct from the new soil, 
being darker, more uniform in texture, and 
more fibrous and loamy. Every time a plot 
of ground is dug and pulverized, every time 
it is hoed and cultivated, the result is to 
break the soil up into smaller and smaller 
particles. The addition of manures, the 
spading under of millions of plant roots, 
gradually fill it with vegetable matter which 
rapidly decays and gives it its darker color. 
The lower layer or subsoil gets mixed with 
the top soil, and makes a blend which is quite 
uniform in character to a considerable depth. 
This is usually a gradual process, but it can 
be hastened by the methods suggested in the 
following paragraphs. 
So far as the available plant foods are 
concerned, it is not so easy to distinguish 
between the old soil and the new. Available 
plant foods are combinations or forms of 
nitrogen, phosphoric acid, potash, and a few 
other plant food elements that will dissolve 
in the moisture present in the soil, and can. 
F. F. ROCKWELL 
therefore, be absorbed or taken up by the 
plant’s roots. There may be, for instance, 
the same amount of nitrogen in the sole of 
an old shoe, a piece of charred bone, a fork¬ 
ful of well rotted manure, and a spoonful of 
nitrate of soda. So far as the plant is con¬ 
cerned, there is a great difference. The ni¬ 
trogen in the nitrate of soda is available for 
use within a few weeks or months. That in 
the bone will become available only as it 
decomposes gradually during several years; 
while that in the shoe sole will remain latent 
or unavailable for many years, as only a very 
small part of its surface will decompose 
each season to become soluble in the soil. 
Right here there comes in another point 
which directly affects our problem of mak¬ 
ing new soil productive as quickly as possi¬ 
ble. If the nitrate of soda, the manure, the 
bone and the leather should each be thor¬ 
oughly ground up or pulverized before being 
added to the soil, they will all be available 
for the plant’s use much more rapidly than 
if they were left in their original states. So 
WHAT YOU SHOULD 
HAVE TO 
MAKE A NEW GARDEN 
Implements 
Wheel hoe, according to type... .$4.50 to $9 
Warren hoe. 
. .75 to 90 cents 
Square point spade. 
.$1.15 
Reel and marking line. 
.. .$1.65 
Steel bow rake. 
.80 cents 
Draw hoe. 
.50 cents 
6" trowel. 
.45 cents 
10-quart watering pot. 
. $1 
Wheelbarrow. 
.$4 
Plant Foods 
Grouna bone. 
$3 per 100 lbs. 
Wood ashes.$1.75 per 100 lbs. 
Blood and bone. 
$3 per 100 lbs. 
the more you pulverize your new soil, the 
more quickly the plant foods in it will be 
available and the better the crop. 
Now, in the old soil there is a gradual ac¬ 
cumulation from year to year of all kinds of 
plant foods in various stages of decomposi¬ 
tion or availability, so that you will be get¬ 
ting this season the benefit of fertilizers and 
manures added to the soil during several 
years back. The results obtained are nat¬ 
urally credited to the fertilizers put on this 
spring. And when the sarne materials, put 
on new soil, do not give similar results, their 
failure to do so is wrongly attributed to the 
fact that the soil is new. 
The decayed vegetable matter, or humus, 
already mentioned, also gradually accumu¬ 
lates in the soil. It is not directly a plant 
food, but its presence is essential for several 
reasons. In the first place it tends to keep 
the soil open and spongy, so that it can catch 
and retain much more moisture than soil 
that is without humus. It readily permits 
the free circulation of air through the soil 
and furnishes congenial conditions for the 
rapid increase of the bacteria in the soil. 
The vegetable matter in the soil becomes 
valuable for this purpose only as it decays 
and decomposes—in other words, as it 
changes from vegetable matter into humus. 
As with manure and fertilizer, its benefits 
are felt not as soon as it is added to the soil, 
but several months, or even two or three 
years in many cases, later. 
Bacteria in the Soil 
Bacteria in the soil—or, to be more exact at 
the expense of using a few polysyllabics, the 
bacteriological activity in the soil—are one 
of the important factors of fertility because 
through their development and growth these 
invisible but extremely active and voracious 
little bugs aid very materially in changing 
insoluble and unavailable forms of plant 
food into forms that are soluble and avail¬ 
able. Some of them do even more than that; 
they assist directly in feeding the plants by 
gathering nitrogen from the air and “fixing” 
it in little storehouses or nodules on the 
plants’ roots, where sooner or later growing 
plants will make use of it. 
These minute allies of the gardener are 
found in much greater numbers in old soils 
than in new. While they multiply with in¬ 
comprehensible rapidity, there being innu¬ 
merable generations of them in a single day, 
the amount of assistance they can render de¬ 
pends upon two things : the first is their even 
distribution throughout the soil, so that they 
can lie in wait, as it were, to go to work at 
the very first opportunity; the second is to 
have conditions such that they will multiply 
rapidly. Under ordinary methods of culti¬ 
vation, it is several years before this even 
distribution is accomplished and these favor¬ 
able conditions prevail in any soil; that is 
another reason why the old garden is likely 
to make a better showing than the new. 
Last, but nearer greatest than least, comes 
the matter of soil moisture. Surely, you 
say, as much rain falls on the new garden 
as on the old! Very true; but the thing of 
importance is not how much falls, but how 
much is saved. The water saving or retain¬ 
ing capacity of a soil is determined by the 
degree of fineness into which it is pulver¬ 
ized, the amount of humus it contains, and 
the thoroughness of the dust mulch with 
which it can be kept covered. All of these 
factors, as we have already seen, are likely 
to be in favor of the old garden as compared 
with the newly made one. 
Improving Soil Conditions 
There you have the reasons why your new 
garden is so often disappointing. The prac¬ 
tical question that remains is what can be 
done about it. A definite answer can be put, 
rather compactly, into the following five sug¬ 
gestions, which can be applied equally to the 
new flower bed and the vegetable garden, 
hardy border, shrub plantings, strawberry 
patch, or whatever you may be expecting to 
put out this year: 
{Continued on page 90) 
