Spring Cleaning

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Mar 29, 1906

If you have not time to do it yourself, interest the children in the cleaning up of the back yard. Nothing works more for the ‘good of the home’ than creating an interest in flowers and flower gardening, and beautifying the waste places in and about the farm or village houses. Many front and back yards may be redeemed from barrenness and neglect and from being a dumping-ground for the refuse of the family and farm. If no better can be done with these unsightly places, they might be sown down to rye or oats, or planted with corn. Anything is better than briars, bushes, old lumber, broken vehicles, tin cans, and the thousand things it is found most convenient to throw down in such places. Don’t allow the calves, or the hens, or the colts, or the pigs to use the yards as a pasture, and then wonder why the girls and boys want to leave home as soon as they are big enough to feel ashamed of “the looks of things.”

The flower garden, or, rather, the work in one, is one of the best nerve restorers in the world; better than any pills or powders or “teaspoonfuls.” Did you ever see a woman scowling over her flower bed? Did you ever see a morbid flower gardener? One who has a nice-looking yard, with plenty of shrubbery and blooming plants dotting the green-sward, is rarely a gloomy person, and never a pessimist. It is seldom the owner of a really “cozy corner” who wants to leave home, and nowadays, if the girls and boys can be proud of their homes, they find them infinitely more attractive than the life in the dirty town. It is seldom the woman’s fault that the yards are full of litter or overgrown with bushes, briars, burdock, cockleburs, jimson-weed, nightshade, etc., but she gets discouraged when, year after year, her plant beds and shrub borders are used for a browsing place for stock, and a dumping place for worn-out and broken-down vehicles, and small wonder if she gets cross and nagging, slipshod in manner and dress. Why should she look any better than her surroundings? She loses all heart. Begin now, to-day, this week, and “clean up and beautify the yards.— Selected.