Articles, home vegetable garden.
In deciding upon the location of the home vegetable garden is well to dispose once and for all, the old idea that the garden ‘patch’ to be an ugly stain on the domestic environment. If thoughtfully planned, carefully planted and thoroughly cared for, it can be a beautiful and harmonious feature of the general scheme, lending some comfortable homeliness that no shrubs, borders, beds or even manufactured.
With this fact in mind, we will not feel confined to a part of the premises merely because it is out of sight behind the barn or garage. The average medium-sized place there will be little choice as to the shore. It will be necessary, then what should be done, and even the best that can be done with it. But then there is a lot of choice as the first, exposure, and second, convenience. Other things being equal, select a location nearby, easily accessible. It would seem that the difference is only a few hundred yards will mean nothing, but if you have spare moment to a large extent depending on the job, and looking at the garden, and the more vegetables the latter is almost as important as the former this matter of convenient access will be much more important than it is likely that the first recognized. No, it was not until that time-consuming travel to a dozen forgotten seeds or tools, or gotten your feet Soaking Wet by going through the dew-drenched grass, and then you realize that what you mean completely.
Exposure.
But the first important thing to consider in picking out the spot, that is to yield you happiness and delicious vegetables in the summer, or even many years of exposure. Take the ‘earliest’ spot in the land slopes down a little to the south or east, that seems to catch sunshine early and late to keep, and that it appears that the direct path of the chilling north and northeast winds. If a building or even an old fence, protects it in this direction, the garden will help along the beautiful, because an early start to a great big factor toward success. If this is not protected, a board fence, or hedge, some low-growing shrubs or young evergreens, will add very significantly to its usefulness. The importance of such a protection or shelter is altogether underestimated the amateur.
The soil.
The chances that you will not find a place of ideal garden soil ready for use anywhere in your place. But all but the worst soil brought up to a very high degree of productiveness especially such small areas as home vegetable gardens require. Large tracts of which the soil is almost pure sand, and other hard and dirty, that for centuries they lay uncultivated, often acting in the course of only a few years, where every year a huge crop yield on a commercial basis. So do not be discouraged about the soil. Proper treatment is much more important, and the average run-down garden patch, or ‘never raised’ in the soil will be much more energetic and careful gardener than the richest spot will increase the average production.
The ideal garden soil is a ‘rich, sandy loam.’ And the fact can not be overemphasized that such soils usually are made, not found. Let me analyze that description a bit, because here we come to the first four of the important factors of gardening food. The rest of the cultivation, moisture and temperature. ‘Rich’ in the gardener’s vocabulary means full of plant food; more, and this means that the critical point, full of plant food ready to be used at once, all prepared and spread on the garden table, or rather, where more and more things at once use it, or what is a word ‘available’ plant food. Soils with virtually no long-lived communities, of course, still rich enough to produce large crops. They are rich, or kept in a rich, in two ways: firstly, the production, which helps to change the raw plant food stored in the soil, the available forms, and, secondly, fertilization or the addition of the food-plant soil from outside sources.
‘Sandy’ in the sense used here means the soil contains enough particles of sand, the water passed through it without leaving it pasty and sticky a few days after the rain, ‘light’ enough, as the name, so that a handful of ordinary circumstances will crumble and fall apart easily after pressing his hand. It is not necessary that the soil be sandy in appearance, but it should be friable.
‘adobe: a rich, friable soil,’ says Webster. That they do not meet, but it does not describe it. This is the soils where the sand and clay are in proper proportions, so that neither is very predominate, and usually dark in color, the cultivation and enrichment. Such as soil, even the untrained eye, just naturally looks as if things would grow. It is remarkable how quickly the whole physical appearance of a piece of well cultivated ground will change. A copy of the attention has been falling in the autumn of last year is one area where the tape was an acre for two years, onions and a little bit off the peak in the middle of them was prepared for only one season. The other has not received any extra manuring or cultivation. When the field was plowed up in the autumn, all three sections were of a purely felt as if separated by a fence. And I know that next spring’s crop of rye, before being plowed under, will show the demarcation line as recorded.
