FullReads

Fred says we ought to have a wheel-barrow; Hank swears by a mulching iron; Bill is all for cold frames. All three say that hellebore is the best thing for sucking insects. We echo the expletive, with a different application.

You see, we have no instinct for gardening. Some fellows, like Bill Stites, have a divinely implanted zest for the propagation of chard and rhubarb and self-blanching celery and kohl-rabi; they are kohl-rabid, we might say. They know, just what to do when they see a weed; they can assassinate a weevil by just looking at it. But weevils and cabbage worms are unterrified by us. We can’t tell a weed from a young onion. We never mulched anything in our life; we wouldn’t know how to begin.

But the deuce of it is, public opinion says that we must raise a garden. It is no use to hire a man to do it for us. However badly we may do it, patriotism demands that we monkey around with a garden of our own. We may get bitten by a snapping bean or routed by a rutabaga or infected by a parsnip. But with Bill and those fellows at our heels we have just got to face it. Hellebore!

What we want to know is, How do you ever find out all these things about vegetables? We bought an ounce of tomato seeds in desperation, and now Fred says “one ounce of tomato seeds will produce 3,000 plants. You should have bought two dozen plants instead of the seed.” How does he know those things? Hank says beans are very delicate and must not be handled while they are wet or they may get rusty. Again we ask, how does he know? Where do they learn these matters? Bill says that stones draw out the moisture from the soil and every stone in the garden should be removed by hand before we plant. We offered him twenty cents an hour to do it.

The most tragic odor in the world hangs over Marathon these days; the smell of freshly spaded earth. It is extolled by the poets and all those happy sons of the pavement who know nothing about it. But here are we, who hardly know a loam from a lentil, breaking our back over seed catalogues. Public opinion may compel us to raise vegetables, but we are going to go about it our own way. If the stones are going to act like werewolves and suck the moisture from our soil, let them do so. We don’t believe in thwarting nature. Maybe it will be a very wet summer and we shall have the laugh on Bill, who has carted away all his stones.

And we should just like to see Bill Stites write a poem. We bet it wouldn’t look as much like a poem as our beans look like beans. And as for Hank and Fred, they wouldn’t even know how to begin to plant a poem!