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Garden
tools have been improved, but they are
still the same old one-man
affairs--doing one thing, one row at a time.
Labor is still the big factor--and
that, taken in combination with the cost of
transporting and handling such
perishable stuff as garden produce,
explains why growing vegetables and doing
your own vegetable gardening can be much less expense than
buying them. That is a
good fact to remember.
But after all, I doubt if most of us will
look at the matter only after
consulting the household budget. The big thing,
the salient feature
of home vegetable gardening is not that
we may grow vegetables ten per cent
cheaper, but that we can have them one hundred
per cent better.
Even the long-keeping sorts, like squash,
potatoes and onions,
are very perceptibly more delicious right from
the home garden, fresh
from the vines or the ground; but when it comes
to peas, and corn, and
lettuce,--well, there is absolutely nothing to
compare with the home
vegetable garden ones, gathered fresh, in the early
slanting sunlight, still
gemmed with dew, still crisp and tender and
juicy, ready to carry every
atom of savory quality, without loss, to the
dining table. Stale, flat
and unprofitable indeed, after these have once
been tasted, seem the
limp, travel-weary, dusty things that are
jounced around to us in the
back of a truck .
It is not in price alone that
makes vegetable gardening pay.
There is another point: the market gardener has
to grow the things that
give the biggest yield. He has to sacrifice
quality to quantity. You do not.
One cannot buy Golden Bantam corn, or Mignonette
lettuce, or Gradus
peas in most markets. They are top quality, but
they do not fill the market
crate enough times to the row to pay the
commercial grower. If you cannot
afford to keep a professional gardener there is
only one way to have the
best vegetables--growing your own!
And this brings us to the third, and what may
be the most important
reason why you should have a vegetable garden. It is the
cheapest, healthiest, keenest
pleasure there is. Give me a sunny garden patch
in the golden
springtime, when the trees are picking out their
new gowns, in all the
various self-colored delicate grays and
greens--strange how beautiful
they are, in the same old unchanging styles,
isn't it?--give me seeds
to watch as they find the light, plants to tend
as they take hold in
the fine, loose, rich soil, and you may have the
other sports. And when
you have grown tired of their monotony, come
back in summer to even the
smallest vegetable garden, and you will find in it, every
day, a new problem to
be solved, a new campaign to be carried out, a
new victory to win.
Better food, better health, better living--all
these vegetable gardening
offers you in abundance. And the price is only
the price of every
worth-while thing--honest, cheerful patient
work.
But enough for now of the dream
vegetable garden. Put down your book.
Put on your old clothes , and let's go outdoors
and look the place over, and pick out the best
spot for growing vegetables.
Growing Vegetables | Vegetable Gardening
| Vegetable Garden
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