48 
HOUSE & GARDEN 
YOUR ALL-YEAR GARDEN 
Testing Seeds, Collecting Catalogues and Looking Over Your Tools Are the Three Important Jobs in January 
F. F. ROCKWELL 
The Editor will he glad to answer subscribers’ questions pertaining to individual problems connected with the gardens and the grounds. With inquiries send 
self-addressed stamped envelope. 
Submitting to the lure of catalogs is the gardener’s most 
enjoyable indoor work. Order them now-order all of 
them and invest a few evenings in the study of their pages 
A NOTHER season, with its successes, 
failures, mistakes and lessons, lies 
behind us, and a new one, fraught 
with the possibilities of great improve¬ 
ments over what we may have done in the 
past, is spread ahead of us. Undoubtedly 
you have been urged already to make good 
resolutions. I will not attempt to repeat 
that advice here, except by way of an 
amendment: that the garden should be in¬ 
cluded along with the other things which 
the ministers and editors have mentioned. 
Resolve to have, during the coming season, 
a better vegetable garden and a more beau¬ 
tiful flower garden than you ever had be¬ 
fore, but don’t let it go at that; good reso¬ 
lutions alone are about as effective as shells 
without powder. Unless you do something, 
at once, towards making a better garden 
a reality, things will drift along until plant¬ 
ing time, and it will be a matter of the 
season’s luck whether your gardens are 
better or poorer than they were last year. 
It is not so important to resolve to have 
a better garden as to resolve to do some¬ 
thing about it immediately, and to do it. 
Then the improvement over last year’s 
garden will be an assured fact. 
To look at the thing a moment from a 
practical point of view, there is every prob¬ 
ability that vegetable gardens will pay this 
year as never before. There is no indi¬ 
cation at present of an early termination 
of the frightful slaughter and destruction 
in Europe. The level of food prices is 
bound to continue to rise, as it has risen 
with insignificant setbacks for the last two 
decades. On the other hand, modern irri¬ 
gation, the perfection of small hand tools 
and spraying apparatus, and newer methods 
and improved varieties of vegetables have 
made it possible for the home gardener 
to produce more than he formerly could, 
with a great deal more certainty, and no 
increased expenditure of time and physi¬ 
cal effort. The home garden is more and 
more becoming an important economic fac¬ 
tor in the yearly budget for thousands of 
families. Let your “preparedness” begin 
at home. Plan now for a well supplied 
table this summer and an ample store of 
vegetables and fruit and preserves for next 
wdnter. 
Extending the Home Into the Garden 
Old subscribers to House and Garden have 
probably noticed already in the new House and 
Garden an editorial policy which aims to con¬ 
sider the house and the garden and all that go 
with them as an architectural unit, and the home 
as an institution, instead of as isolated factors. 
Formerly the home was included within the 
four walls of the house—and during the biggest 
part of the year the windows were kept closed. 
But it has been growing out. First the outdoor 
porch, living-room and dining-room, then over 
these, on the second floor, the sun parlor and 
the sleeping porch. And now the automobile has 
helped to make country living not merely living- 
in a bouse in the country, but in the open air. 
People used to travel merely to get to places; 
with the modern car they travel for the sake 
of travel—the joy of the countryside, the pano¬ 
rama of strange places, the exhilaration of un¬ 
limited and untainted air, and the lure of the 
endless road. But the possibilities of the garden 
as part of the home, of the pergola, the arbor 
and open summerhouse and attached conserva¬ 
tory, as extensions of living-room and library, 
have not yet been anywhere near fully realized. 
Don’t plan your new house or the remodeling 
of your old one without taking these things 
into consideration. Even if the house itself is 
not to be touched, you can do something this 
year to make the garden more of a part of it— 
a pergola leading to a little pool, secluded in the 
privacy afforded by a sheltering evergreen hedge, 
against which a high-backed garden seat invites 
one to bask in the sun—these are simple things 
and not expensive; but what a transformation 
they can make in the spirit as well as in the 
beauty of a garden that has been simply built 
around the house! Think of these things now in 
January, the month of plans! 
Your 1916 Garden 
It may seem a bit premature to begin to talk 
about your 1916 garden, but there are only twelve 
months in a year and only four weeks in each 
month, and it is but a short time before you will 
be looking back on your 1916 garden. Early 
this month the new flower, seed and nursery 
catalogues will be out, and there is a good deal 
you should do before you look at them. There 
is one thing in particular which should begirt 
with the beginning of the year—a “garden book.” 
This is not a difficult matter; you do not need 
to feel about it the urging and boredom of keep¬ 
ing a diary. Your garden book should be a book 
of joy wherein are put thoughts, notes, fancies, 
new ideas, suggestions from magazines and from 
other gardens which you may see, as well as 
records and dates. Get a large, plain blank book, 
preferably with loose leaves; gardening diaries 
and other especially ruled books are not worth 
bothering with. By means of tags or corners 
snipped out of the pages and marked, for an in¬ 
dex, separate this book into three general sec¬ 
tions-—one for flowers, one for vegetables, and 
one for fruits. These should be allotted space 
in the order named—say, half of the book for 
flowers, a third for vegetables, and one-sixth 
for fruit—that is, if all three on your place re¬ 
ceive the usual amount of room and atten¬ 
tion. Each section may be further sub¬ 
divided into a place for plans and ideas, 
and for planting records and notes. The 
latter should be arranged by double pages, 
showing the planting dates, the vegetable 
and varieties, etc., and the corresponding- 
line on the opposite page should be re¬ 
served for date of maturity, remarks as to 
quality, and so forth. If the planting rec¬ 
ords and notes are started on the last 
page of each section and carried backward 
towards the beginning, all the pages can 
be utilized. With a loose-leaf book, of 
course, this will not be necessary, as the 
pages can be added where needed. The 
book should have a substantial, stiff cover¬ 
ing, so that it can be taken out into the 
garden. When j r ou come to plan your 
garden for next spring you can imagine 
what an assistance a book of this kind, 
covering the last two or three years, would 
be—if juju only had it. The moral is, 
start one now, so that next year you will 
have it. 
By way of beginning, measure up care¬ 
fully now the flower garden, vegetable gar¬ 
den, and the space which may be available 
for planting fruit trees and small fruits. 
When jura get started at this work, you 
will think of a great many more things 
that juju would like to do, than it will be 
possible to do, this coming spring; mark 
them down in ink of several colors, and 
plan to carry out each j r ear, for the next 
three or four years, a part of the general 
scheme. You can, for instance, put in red 
ink the things to do this spring, in blue 
those for ’17, and in green those for ’18. 
The pleasure and the results to be had from 
a carefully planned campaign of develop¬ 
ment of this sort are accumulative. 
Look Over and Test Your 
Seeds Now 
Seed testing should be done at once, as 
it is necessarj r to get your results before 
sending in j r our orders. It takes some 
varieties ten days to two weeks to germi¬ 
nate in a soil test. Get out any of last 
juar’s seeds which maj- have been left over, 
that are in the original packets or are carefully 
labeled; it will not pay for a minute to keep and 
plant any seeds the variety or germinations of 
which you are in doubt. The number of years 
for which seeds of various kinds ought to be 
good, provided they -were fresh when they were 
bought, is approximately as follows: Cucumber, 
musk melon, water melon and squash, 7 years; 
eggplant, 7 years; okra, 3; onions, 2; lettuce, 
peppers and tomatoes, 5. v 
The “blotter” test can be made very simply. 
Upon a blotter soaked with water, place fifty or 
a hundred seeds; cover these with another blot¬ 
ter and.put in a warm place. The quick grow¬ 
ing varieties will show signs of germination in 
twenty-four hours, though others may take sev¬ 
eral daj 7 s. The “soil test,” however, is much 
more satisfactory. In an ordinary shallow flat 
place a layer of sphagnum moss and cover this 
for an inch or so with fine, light soil. This flat 
should have a tight bottom and a cheap tin fun¬ 
nel can be inserted in one corner so that the 
moss can be saturated until the soil begins to 
show dampness on the surface, without directly 
watering the soil at all. Sow the seeds, twenty- 
five to a hundred, according to size, in separate 
rows, very carefully tagged as to variety and 
number sown, and keep the box in a warm place 
covered with a pane of glass until all have ger¬ 
minated that will. Remember that these tests 
are made under the most favorable conditions, 
and that in the garden, when actually planting, 
you will not get nearly as good results. Allow¬ 
ance must be made particularly where the 
“blotter test” is used. 
