Requisites Of The Home Vegetable Garden
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Necessities Of The Home Vegetable Garden.
Determining the place for the home vegetable garden it is well to dispose once and for all of the old thought that the garden “patch” must be an dark spot in the home surroundings. If thoughtfully designed, cautiously planted & soundly cared for, it may be made a glorious & harmonious feature of the general scheme, lending a touch of comfortable homeliness that no bushes, borders, or beds can ever produce.
With this fact in mind we will not feel restricted to any part of the premises simply because it is out of sight behind the barn or garage. In the regular moderate-sized place there will not be much alternative as to land. It will be required to take what is to be had and then do the very best that can be done with it. But there will believably be a good deal of choice as to, first, exposure, and second, convenience. Other things being adequate, select a spot near at hand, easy of access. It may seem that a difference of only a few hundred yards will mean nothing, But if one is depending largely upon extra moments for working in and for watching the garden & in the growing of many vegetables the latter is almost as essential as the former this matter of favorable access will be of much greater importance than is likely to be at first acknowledged. Not until you have had to make a dozen time-wasting trips for forgotten seeds or tools, or gotten your feet soaking wet by going out through the dew-drenched grass, will you visualize fully what this may mean.
Exposure.
However the thing of first importance to consider in picking out the spot that is to yield you happiness & delicious vegetables all summer, or even for many years, is the exposure. Pick out the “earliest” spot you can find a plot sloping a little to the south or east, that seems to catch sunshine early and hold it late, and that seems to be out of the direct path of the chilling north and northeast winds. If a building, or even an old fence, protects it from this direction, your garden will be helped along marvelously, for an early start is a great big factor toward success. If it is not already protected, a board fence, or a hedge of some low-growing shrubs or young evergreen plants, will add very greatly to its usefulness. The importance of having such a protection or shelter is totally undervalued by the unskilled.
The soil.
The chances are that you will not find a spot of ideal garden soil ready for use anywhere upon your place. However all except the very cheapest of soils can be brought up to a very high degree of productiveness specially such small areas as home vegetable gardens demand. Large tracts of soil that are almost pure sand, and others so heavy & sloppy that for centuries they lay uncultivated, have frequently been brought, in the course of only a few years, to where they yield per annum tremendous crops on a commercial basis. So do not be discouraged about your soil. Proper handling of it is much more important, & a garden- patch of average run-down, or “never-brought-up” soil will produce much more for the energetic and careful gardener than the richest spot will grow under limited methods of cultivation.
The perfect garden soil is a “rich, sandy loam.” and the fact cannot be overemphasized that such soils generally are made, not found. Let us analyse that description a bit, for right here we come to the first of the four essential factors of gardening food. The others are cultivation, moisture & temperature. “Rich” in the gardener’s vocabulary means full of plant food; more than that and this is a point of vital importance it means full of plant food ready to be used at once, all prepared & spread out on the garden table, or preferably in it, where growing things can at once make use of it; or what we term, in one word, “available” plant food. Practically no soils in long- inhabited communities remain naturally rich enough to produce big crops. They are made rich, or kept rich, in two ways; first, by cultivation, which helps to change the raw plant food stored in the soil into obtainable forms; & second, by manuring or adding plant food to the soil from outside sources.
“Sandy” in the sense here used, means a soil containing enough particles of sand so that water will pass through it without leaving it pasty & sticky a few days after a rain; “light” enough, as it is called, so that a handful, under ordinary conditions, will crumble & fall apart readily after being pressed in the hand. It is not essential that the soil be sandy in appearance, But it should be crumbly.
“Loam: a rich, crumbly soil,” says Webster. That hardly covers it, however it does identify it. It is soil in which the sand and clay are in particular proportions, so that neither greatly predominate, & usually dark in color, from cultivation and enrichment. Such a soil, even to the untrained eye, just naturally looks as if it would grow things. It is significant how quickly the whole physical appearance of a piece of well cultivated ground will change. An instance came under my notice last fall in one of my fields, where a strip containing an acre had been two years in onions, & a little piece jutting off from the middle of this had been prepared for them just one season. The rest had not received any extra manuring or cultivation. When the field was plowed up in the fall, all three sections were as clearly noticeable as though classified by a fence. And I know that next spring’s crop of rye, before it is ploughed under, will show thedemarcation lines just as plainly.
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