HOUSE AND GARDEN 
339 
them in unusual 
ways. But there are 
hard-and-fast rules 
about treating your 
plant s— i f you 
want certain re¬ 
sults. In the first 
place, you must 
abandon the idea, 
if you have it, that 
you can set out a 
plant, even a good, 
healthy one, in any 
old spot and watch 
it grow and bloom 
without further in¬ 
terruption. The farmer would no more think of feeding and car¬ 
ing for — or rather starving and neglecting — his onions and pota¬ 
toes, the way many persons do their flowers, than you would think 
of sending your boy to school without his breakfast. Prepare the 
ground for your flowers and plants just as thoroughly as you do 
your garden path, and if you are not in the habit of preparing that 
carefully, read the April House and Garden. Enrich each bed 
and spot, no matter how small, with fine, rotten manure, or, if 
you cannot obtain that, with chemical fertilizers. Spade the soil 
up deep ; pulverize it thoroughly, and then you will have laid at 
least the foundation of success with your flowers. That is not all, 
however; you must plant carefully. I suppose literally thousands 
of dollars’ worth of plants are lost annually through the very com¬ 
mon mistake of setting plants loosely. Put your plants in firmly. 
There seems to be an idea prevalent that the making of a new 
flower bed is a very difficult art — otherwise we would see them 
more frequently. As a matter of fact, it is a very simple task; and 
there are dozens of lawns and front yards in every community 
which would be greatly improved by a bed or border which could 
be made in two or three hours’ work with a spade and garden line. 
Select a spot — not in the shade or near trees, whose roots take 
food and moisture quickly from the soil—and line out the bed, 
using a dozen or so pieces of shingle or short stakes. If it is to 
follow a curve, use the line to describe an arc, marked as you 
progress by stakes ; or set them in approximate position and then 
move one here and there until you get a true curve. With an 
edger, or the spade, cut neatly along the lines and then lift up the 
sod in squares, taking only the surface and leaving all the soil you 
can. Spade the bed up, down to poor earth, and enrich with fine 
manure. If the soil is very poor, or gravelly, haul in a barrowful 
or two of good garden loam. It will be well, in any case, to add 
enough soil to raise the center of the bed, which should be slightly 
rounded up a few inches above the level of the lawn. All the 
work necessary to keep such a bed in the best of shape is an an¬ 
nual application of manure and a mid-season top-dressing of fer¬ 
tilizer, with an occasional trim¬ 
ming of the edges. Until you 
make one you can have little 
idea how much it will add to 
the appearance of your 
grounds. 
IN THE VEGETABLE GARDEN 
In the first installment of this 
article (see April House and 
Garden) we considered the 
preparation, manuring a n d 
planting of the garden. We 
saw how to get a good start; 
but to have a successful finish 
heed must be given to proper 
cultivation, the 
fighting of insect 
pests and the spe¬ 
cial requirements 
of various plants. 
The small gar¬ 
den can be man¬ 
aged with very few 
and very simple 
tools. The most 
essential are a 
spade, two hoes — 
one large and one 
small-bladed (see 
article on tools in 
April number), a 
good steel garden rake, a hand-weeder and a plant-duster. I 
should by all means advise, however, the addition of a wheel hoe, 
which may be bought at from three dollars to thirteen dollars, 
and a compressed-air spray pump, which will cost from four dol¬ 
lars to eight dollars. This latter may take the place of the duster 
used for applying dry powders, but it will be well to have both 
when possible. Always keep your tools clean, shapely and in 
repair. 
A good many people — and some who have had gardens for sev¬ 
eral years—think that cultivation means only the removal of weeds 
that get large enough to threaten the existence of everything else 
in the garden. They were never further from the truth. As a mat¬ 
ter of fact the destruction should be merely incidental in the prac¬ 
tice of thorough cultivation. The real purposes of cultivation are 
two: first, to keep the soil so broken up and accessible to air and 
water that there will be a constantly sustained supply of available 
plant food, and secondly, to maintain a mulch of dust, or dry soil 
on the surface, and thus retain and conserve the moisture below ; 
for a mulch of dust will keep the soil below it shaded and damp 
just as effectively as though it were a mulch of straw or leaves. 
So do not wait until a rank growth of weeds compels you to 
cultivate, do it when it should be done. In dry weather try to get 
over all the surface between rows as often as once in every ten 
days. Remember that if you cultivate often so that no weeds get 
started, you can go over your garden with a wheel hoe or an 
iron rake nearly as fast as you can walk. Further weeding in¬ 
structions are given on page 366. 
At the second, or sometimes the third weeding, the plants are 
thinned to the proper distance in the row. It is a good plan to do 
this work on a cloudy day, or late in the afternoon. If the plants 
that remain seem at all wobbly, going over the rows and drawing 
up the earth slightly will prove beneficial. 
Some plants, like potatoes, beans, and sometimes cabbage or 
corn, are benefited by a slight hilling, but this practice is not nearly 
so much used as formerly. The objection to it is that it exposes 
an unnecessary amount of soil 
surface to wind and sun, thus 
increasing the rate of evapora¬ 
tion. 
The culture of vegetables has 
in many respects been simplified 
during recent years. But in at 
least one important thing the 
change has been in the oppo¬ 
site direction — and that is in the 
fighting of plant enemies, both 
insects and diseases. There 
seems to be a bug or worm for 
every plant that grows, and as 
the plants have, with the as- 
(Continued on page 374) 
May, 1911 
Cauliflower needs lots of moisture to produce 
large heads. Blanch by tying leaves to¬ 
gether or covering with paper 
The enemy of squash is the squash-bug, which must be killed in 
the egg state while attached to the leaves 
The finest onions are from seeds, but buy 
onion sets now as it is too late to start 
seeds, and plant in richest soil 
