A SPACE twenty by fifty feet may, under intensive culture, be made to yield fresh vegetables for a small family through half the year,” says Martha McCulloch-Williams in the Country Home Circle of The Circle magazine for March. “With forty feet by fifty, or fifty by one hundred, there can be a garden spelling riotous plenty.
“Have the spading done as early as possible, use thoroly rotted manure, and supplement it with some good commercial fertilizer, either broadcasted and raked in or put in hills or drills.
“It is a waste of seed, strength, and time to plant a garden in poor soil. The seed will come up, the spindling plants will be harder to work than if they were luxuriant, and the resultant crop will be mostly conspicuous by its absence. So, if it be impossible to do more, make small rich beds, four feet wide and as long as the manure holds out, and sow them crosswise with such things as radishes, lettuce, cress, parsley, beets, and onions. Make the rows a foot to eighteen inches apart, or sow the radishes broadcast. Lettuce also yields more for broadcast sowing. Pull out the thriftiest as soon as edible and leave the rest to grow. Radish tops make excellent greens, something better flavored than mustard. By sowing thickly you can have a great abundance of greens.
The Salton Sea and Salt Works
“Say the garden is forty by fifty feet, this is something what the planting of it should be: Dwarf early peas, medium early and late peas, beets, early and later; beans in succession, including bush limas; carrots, radishes, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers. Do not adventure upon corn unless it be sweet corn planted on the pea space as a second crop, to come in just before frost. Make an asparagus bed all across one end of the plot, setting two-year-old roots, and fertilizing the bed heavily in early summer just after cutting ceases.
“Peas are so hardy they may be planted before snow is past, provided, of course, the ground is right when they go in. Make it fine and light, cover the seed at least three inches deep, then tramp the earth over them, setting the feet so one track touches the other. A quart of seed will sow a hundred feet of drill the proper thickness. An ounce of beet seed will sow the same row length.
“Cultivate your garden with a wheel hoe or use the trowel and hand hoe — remembering Isaak Walton’s adjuration as to the bait worm: ‘Use him as tho you loved him.’ As one thing yields pull it up and plant something else.”
