Essentials Of The Home Vegetable Garden.

In choosing the area for the home vegetable garden it is well to get rid of once

and for all of the out-of-date notion that the garden "patch" needs to be an ugly area in the home surroundings. If thoughtfully worked out, carefully planted and thoroughly taken care of, it may be made a beautiful and harmonious element of the general theme, providing a hint of relaxed homeliness that no hedges, borders, or beds could ever make.

Keeping this fact in mind we will certainly not feel restrained to any area of the premises merely because it is out of sight in back of the barn or garage area. In the average moderate-sized site there will not be a lot of variety as to real estate. It will be necessary to take what is to be had and then do the best that can be achieved with it. But there will most likely be a good deal of choice as to, 1st, exposure, and second, convenience. Other things being equal, pick a area close at hand, very easy of access. It may appear that a difference of just a couple of 100 yards will mean nothing, but if one is depending mostly upon spare moments for working in and for caring for the garden and in the growing of many vegetables the latter is almost as vital as the former this matter of close-by access will be of much higher importance than is likely to be at first recognized. 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 realize fully what this may mean.

Exposure.

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But the matter of paramount import to consider in picking out the area that is to yield you happiness and mouth watering vegetables all summer, or even for many seasons, is the exposure. Choose the "earliest" spot you can locate a plot sloping a little to the south or east, that seems to get sunshine early on and hold it late, and that appears to be out of the direct path of the freezing north and northeast winds. If a building, or even an old fence, shields it from this direction, your garden will be helped along wonderfully, for an early start is a tremendous factor toward success. If it is not currently protected, a wooden fence, or a hedge of some low-growing shrubs or young evergreens, will add substantially to its helpfulness. The importance of having such a protection or shelter is altogether underrated by the rookie.

The soil.

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The odds are that you will not find a spot of optimal garden soil ready for use anywhere upon your area. However all except the very worst of soils may be brought up to a very high degree of efficiency particularly such small areas as home vegetable gardens call for. Sizable tracts of soil that are almost pure sand, and others so heavy and mucky that for centuries they lay untilled, have regularly been brought, over a few seasons, to where they generate annually tremendous crops commercially . So do not be discouraged about your soil. Suitable treatment of it is much more important, and a garden-patch of ordinary run-down, or "never-brought-up" soil will yield much more for the effective and careful gardener than the richest spot will raise under average methods of cultivation.

The optimal garden soil is a "rich, sandy loam." And the fact can not be overstated that such soils usually are made, not found. Let us study that description a bit, for right here we get the first of the four essential factors of vegetable garden nourishment. The others are cultivation, moisture and temperature. "Rich" in the gardener's vocabulary means filled with plant food; more than that and this is a point of crucial importance it means full of plant food ready to be used at once, all prepared and spread out on the garden table, or rather in it, where fruits and vegetables can immediately take advantage of it; or what we term, in one word, "available" plant food. Practically no soils in long - inhabited communities continue to be naturally rich enough to generate large crops. They are made rich, or kept rich, in two ways; first, by cultivation, which helps to transform the raw plant food stored in the soil into accessible forms; and next, by composting or adding plant food to the soil from external means.

"Sandy" in the context here used, implies a soil containing enough particles of sand so that water will pass through it without leaving it pasty and gummy a couple of days after a rain; "light" enough, as it is called, so that a handful, under usual conditions, will crumble and fall apart freely after being compressed in the hand. It is not essential that the soil be sandy in look, but it needs to be friable.

"Loam: a rich, friable soil," says Webster. That barely covers it, but it does describe it. It is soil in which the sand and clay are in appropriate percentages, so that neither greatly predominate, and generally dark in color, from cultivation and enrichment. Such a soil, even to the inexperienced eye, just naturally seems as if it would grow things. It is amazing how rapidly the whole physical look of a piece of well-cultivated ground will change. A case came under my notice last autumn in one of my plots, where a strip consisting of an acre had been 2 seasons in onions, and a little piece jutting off from the middle of this had been prepared for them just one season. The other parts had not received any additional composting or cultivation. When the field was plowed up in the autumn, all three areas were as clearly noticeable just as though separated by a fence. And I know that following spring's crop of rye, right before it is plowed under, will show the lines of demarcation just as clearly.

by: Gail Greene

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