Home Vegetable Gardening, F. F. Rockwell [popular novels .txt] 📗

storing over

winter they will not only last for years, but add greatly to the

convenience of cultivation and to the neat appearance of the garden.

Various contrivances are illustrated in the seed catalogues, and many

may be home-made—such as a stake-trellis for supporting beans.

 

As a final word to the intending purchaser of garden tools, I would

say: first thoroughly investigate the different sorts available, and

when buying, do not forget that a good tool or a well-made machine will

be giving you satisfactory use long, long after the price is forgotten,

while a poor one is a constant source of discomfort. Get good tools,

and take good care of them. And let me repeat that a few dollars

a year, judiciously spent, for tools afterward well cared for, will

soon give you a very complete set, and add to your garden profit and

pleasure.

 

CHAPTER VI.

 

MANURES AND FERTILIZERS

 

To a very small extent garden vegetables get their food from the air.

The amount obtained in this way however, is so infinitesimal that from

the practical standpoint it need not be considered at all. Practically

speaking, your vegetables must get all their food from the garden soil.

 

This important garden fact may seem self-evident, but, if one may judge

by their practice, amateur gardeners very frequently fail to realize

it. The professional gardener must come to realize it for the simple

reason that if he does not he will go out of business. Without an

abundant supply of suitable food it is just as impossible to grow good

vegetables as it would be to train a winning football team on a diet of

sweet cider and angel cake. Without plenty of plant food, all the care,

coddling, coaxing, cultivating, spraying and worrying you may give will

avail little. The soil must be rich or the garden will be poor.

 

Plant food is of as many kinds, or, more accurately speaking, in as

many forms, as is food for human beings. But the first

distinction to make in plant foods is that between available and non-available foods—that is, between foods which it is possible for the

plant to use, and those which must undergo a change of some sort before

the plant can take them up, assimilate them, and turn them into a

healthy growth of foliage, fruit or root. It is just as readily

possible for a plant to starve in a soil abounding in plant food, if

that food is not available, as it would be for you to go unnourished in

the midst of soups and tender meats if the latter were frozen solid.

 

Plants take all their nourishment in the form of soups, and very weak

ones at that. Plant food to be available must be soluble to the action

of the feeding root tubes; and unless it is available it might, as far

as the present benefiting of your garden is concerned, just as well not

be there at all. Plants take up their food through innumerable and

microscopic feeding rootlets, which possess the power of absorbing

moisture, and furnishing it, distributed by the plant juices, or sap,

to stem, branch, leaf, flower and fruit. There is one startling fact

which may help to fix these things in your memory: it takes from 300 to

500 pounds of water to furnish food for the building of one pound of

dry plant matter. You can see why plant food is not of much use unless

it is available; and it is not available unless it is soluble.

 

THE THEORY OF MANURING

 

The food of plants consists of chemical elements, or rather, of

numerous substances which contain these elements in greater or less

degrees. There is not room here to go into the interesting science of

this matter. It is evident, however, as we have already seen that the

plants must get their food from the soil, that there are but two

sources for such food: it must either be in the soil already, or we

must put it there. The practice of adding plant food to the soil is

what is called manuring.

 

The only three of the chemical elements mentioned which we need

consider are: nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash. The average soil

contains large amounts of all three, but they are for the most part in

forms which are not available and, therefore, to that extent, may be at

once dismissed from our consideration. (The non-available plant foods

already in the soil may be released or made available to some extent by

cultivation. See Chapter VII.) In practically every soil that has been

cultivated and cropped, in long-settled districts, the amounts of

nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash which are immediately available

will be too meager to produce a good crop of vegetables. It becomes

absolutely necessary then, if one would have a really successful

garden, no matter how small it is, to add plant foods to the soil

abundantly. When you realize, (1) that the number of plant foods

containing the three essential elements is almost unlimited, (2) that

each contains them in different proportions and in differing degrees of

availability, (3) that the amount of the available elements already in

the soil varies greatly and is practically undeterminable, and (4) that

different plants, and even different varieties of the same plant, use

these elements in widely differing proportions; then you begin to

understand what a complex matter this question of manuring is and why

it is so much discussed and so little understood. What a labyrinth it

offers for any writer—to say nothing of the reader—to go astray in!

 

I have tried to present this matter clearly. If I have succeeded it may

have been only to make the reader hopelessly discouraged of ever

getting at anything definite in the question of enriching the soil. In

that case my advice would be that, for the time being, he forget all

about it. Fortunately, in the question of manuring, a little knowledge

is not often a dangerous thing. Fortunately, too, your plants do not

insist that you solve the food problem for them. Set a full table and

they will help themselves and take the right dishes. The only thing to

worry about is that of the three important foods mentioned (nitrogen,

phosphoric acid and potash) there will not be enough: for it has been

proved that when any one of these is exhausted the plant practically

stops growth; it will not continue to “fill up” on the other two. Of

course there is such a thing as going to extremes and wasting plant

foods, even if it does not, as a rule, hurt the plants. If, however,

the fertilizers and manures described in the following sections are

applied as directed, and as mentioned in Chapter VII., good results

will be certain, provided the seed, cultivation and season are right.

 

VARIOUS MANURES

 

The terms “manure” and “fertilizer” are used

somewhat ambiguously and interchangeably. Using the former term in a

broad sense—as meaning any substance containing available plant food

applied to the soil, we may say that manure is of two kinds: organic,

such as stable manure, or decayed vegetable matter; and inorganic, such

as potash salts, phosphatic rock and commercial mixed fertilizers. In a

general way the term “fertilizer” applies to these inorganic manures,

and I shall use it in this sense through the following text.

 

Between the organic manures, or “natural” manures as they are often

called, and fertilizers there is a very important difference which

should never be lost sight of. In theory, and as a chemical fact too, a

bag of fertilizer may contain twice the available plant food of a ton

of well rotted manure; but out of a hundred practical gardeners ninety-nine—and probably one more—would prefer the manure. There is a reason

why—two reasons, even if not one of the hundred gardeners could give

them to you. First, natural manures have a decided physical effect upon

most soils (altogether aside from the plant food they contain); and

second, plants seem to have a preference as to the form in which

their food elements are served to them. Fertilizers, on the other hand,

are valuable only for the plant food they contain, and sometimes have a

bad effect upon the physical condition of the soil.

 

When it comes right down to the practical question of what to put on

your garden patch to grow big crops, nothing has yet been discovered

that is better than the old reliable stand-by—well rotted, thoroughly

fined stable or barnyard manure. Heed those adjectives! We have already

seen that plant food which is not available might as well be, for our

immediate purposes, at the North Pole. The plant food in “green” or

fresh manure is not available, and does not become so until it is

released by the decay of the organic matters therein. Now the time

possible for growing a crop of garden vegetables is limited; in many

instances it is only sixty to ninety days. The plants want their food

ready at once; there is no time to be lost waiting for manure to rot in

the soil. That is a slow process—especially so in clayey or heavy

soils. So on your garden use only manure that is well rotted and broken

up. On the other hand, see that it has not “fire-fanged” or burned out,

as horse manure, if piled by itself and left, is very sure to do. If

you keep any animals of your own, see that the various sorts of manure

—excepting poultry manure, which is so rich that it is a good plan to

keep it for special purposes—are mixed together and kept in a compact,

built-up square heap, not a loose pyramidal pile. Keep it under cover

and where it cannot wash out. If you have a pig or so, your manure will

be greatly improved by the rooting, treading and mixing they will give

it. If not, the pile should be turned from bottom to top and outside in

and rebuilt, treading down firmly in the process, every month or two—

applying water, but not soaking, if it has dried out in the meantime.

Such manure will be worth two or three times as much, for garden

purposes, as that left to burn or remain in frozen lumps. If you have

to buy all your manure, get that which has been properly kept; and if

you are not familiar with the condition in which it should be, get a

disinterested gardener or farmer to select it for you. When possible,

it will pay you to procure manure several months before you want to use

it and work it over as suggested above. In buying manure keep in mind

not what animals made it, but what food was fed—that is the important

thing. For instance, the manure from highly-fed livery horses may be,

weight for weight, worth three to five times that from cattle wintered

over on poor hay, straw and a few roots.

 

There are other organic manures which it is sometimes possible for one

to procure, such as refuse brewery hops, fish scraps and sewage, but

they are as a rule out of the reach of, or objectionable for, the

purposes of the home gardener.

 

There are, however, numerous things constantly going to waste about the

small place, which should be converted into manure. Fallen leaves,

grass clippings, vegetable tops and roots, green weeds, garbage, house

slops, dish water, chip dirt from the wood-pile, shavings—any thing

that will rot away, should go into the compost heap. These should be

saved, under cover if possible, in a compact heap and kept moist (never

soaked) to help decomposition. To start the heap, gather up every

available substance and make it into a pile with a few wheelbarrows

full, or half a cartload, of fresh horse