Three Acres and Liberty Part 5

Perhaps our locks and bolts tend to suggest breaking in.

The Garden Primer issued by the New York City Food Supply Committee gives simple but incomplete directions for planting and tending a vegetable garden. For those who need that sort of thing, these are just the sort of thing they need. They will be useful if you do not follow them. The Primer tells you how to get some kind of parsnips, chard, spinach, common onions, radishes, cabbage, lettuce, beets, tomatoes, beans, turnips, peas, peppers, egg plants, cuc.u.mbers, corn, and potatoes.

Don't grow these things, unless it be for your own immediate use.

Every one grows them and ripens them all at the same time. In many places these are given away or thrown away this year. Grow anything that every one wants and has not got, like okra, small fruits, etc.; you can get a much better return in cash or in trade than by spending your time "like other folks" who do not think.

So I refer to these directions for their instruction, and for your warning However, they give the following admirable injunctions.

"Help Your Country and Yourself by Raising Your Own Vegetables."

As we will likely have to send to Europe in coming years as much or even more food than we did last year, there is only one way to avoid a shortage among our own people, that is by raising a great deal more than usual. To do this we must plant every bit of available land. (Of course, we can't; the owners won't let us. Ed.)

If you have a back yard, you can do your part and help the world and yourself by raising some of the food you eat. The more you raise the less you will have to buy, and the more there will be left for some of your fellow countrymen who have not an inch of ground on which to raise anything.

If there is a vacant lot in your neighborhood, see if you cannot get the use of it for yourself and your neighbors, and raise your own vegetables. An hour a day spent in this way will not only increase wealth and help your family, but will help you personally by adding to your strength and well-being and making you appreciate the Eden joy of gardening. An hour in the open air is worth more than a dozen expensive prescriptions by an expensive doctor.

The only tools necessary for a small garden are a spade or spading fork, a hoe, a rake, and a line or piece of cord.

First of all, clear the ground of all rubbish, sticks, stones, bottles, etc. (especially whisky bottles).

Choose the sunniest spot in the yard for your garden.

Dig up the soil to a depth of 6 to 10 inches, using a spade or spading fork. (Deeper for parsnips and some other roots. Ed.) Break up all the lumps with the spade or fork.

If you live in a section where your neighbors have gardens, you might club together to hire a teamster for a day to do the plowing and harrowing for you all, thus saving a large amount of labor.

After your garden has been well dug, it must be fertilized before any planting is done. In order to produce large and well-grown crops it is often necessary to fertilize before each planting. Very good prepared fertilizers can be bought at seed stores, but horse or cow manure is much better, as it lightens the soil in addition to supplying plant food. Use street sweepings if you can get them.

The manure should be well dug into the ground, at least to the full depth of the top soil. The ground should then be thoroughly raked, as seeds must be sown in soil which has been finely powdered.

Lay out the garden, keeping the rows straight with a line. Straight rows are practically a necessity, not only for easier culture but for economy in s.p.a.ce.

After you have marked all of your rows, the next step is opening the furrow. (A furrow is a shallow trench.) That is done with the hoe.

(Best and quickest with a wheel hoe. Ed.) After the furrow is opened, it is necessary that the seed be sown and immediately covered before the soil has dried In covering the seeds the soil must be firmly pressed down with the foot. This is important.

In buying seed it is best to go to some well-established seed house, or, if that can't be done, to order by mail rather than to take needless chances. With most kinds of seeds a package is sufficient for a twenty-foot row.

Begin to break up the hard surface of the soil between the plants soon after they appear, using a hand cultivator or hoe, and keep it loose throughout the season. This kills weeds; it lets in air to the plant roots and keeps the moisture in the ground.

By constantly stirring the top soil after your plants appear, the necessity of watering can be largely avoided except in very dry weather. An occasional soaking of the soil is better than frequent sprinkling. Water your garden either very early in the morning or after sundown. It is better not to water when the sun is s.h.i.+ning hot.

The planting scheme can be altered to suit your individual taste.

For instance, peas and cabbage are included because almost everybody likes to have them fresh from their garden; but they occupy more s.p.a.ce in proportion to their value than beets and carrots. Therefore a small garden could be made more profitable by omitting them altogether, or cutting them down in amount and increasing the amount of carrots, beets, and turnips planted; or any of the vegetables mentioned which may not be in favor with the family can be left out.

The kind of season we have would change the date of planting. In raising vegetables, as in everything else, one should use one's common (or garden variety of) sense. A good rule is to wait until the ground has warmed up a bit. Never try to work in soil wet enough to be sticky, or muddy; wait until it dries enough to crumble readily.

Gardening is not a rule of thumb business. Each gardener must bring his plants up in his own way in the light of his own experience and in accordance with the conditions of his own garden. A garden lover who has a bit of land will speedily learn if his eyes and his mind, as well as his hands, are always busy, no matter how meager his knowledge at the beginning.

There is plenty of land--if you can only get it.

Says Carl Vrooman, a.s.sistant Secretary of Agriculture, in regard to the food problem:

"Millions of acres of farm land are being held out of use and other millions of acres are being cultivated on a wasteful and inefficient basis. Land values have risen at an unprecedented rate. They are based not upon what the farm will earn at the present time, but on an expectancy of what it will be worth in the future. The farmer's son or the tenant farmer, with little or no capital, cannot hope to acquire possession of a farm w hen the price of land is SO high that his earnings would not pay the interest on the investment. The result is that land remains idle or in the hands of tenants, and thousands of farmers' boys desert the country for the city.

". . . . What we need, and need badly, is a program of taxation which, without throwing additional burdens on the bona fide farmer, will place land now idle within the reach of men of limited means who possess the ambition and the ability to cultivate it."

You can see that poor ignorant people, women, boys, cripples, old men, often on less than 100 X 150 feet each, not only in Philadelphia, but as war gardeners in New York, and most other towns, have been able to support themselves by their work on the land. You can do much better.

To be sure, they had valuable land and often seeds free, but for such little pieces of land these are small items, and many of them had no certainty of having the land even for a second year, consequently they could not have hotbeds or any permanent improvement. You can make all these things.

Then what can you do? Only remember they had intelligent instruction and did the work themselves, and got the whole product; often the children helped--they thought it fun. It does not pay to farm a small piece of land where all the workers have to be hired. Nor does it pay if one calculates merely to stick in seeds with one hand and pull out profits with the other.

CHAPTER V

RESULTS TO BE EXPECTED.

"If we get every one out on the farms, then there will be an over-production of farm products and a fall in prices."

True, but there are farmers who could do better in towns; what we want to do is to make it easy for people to get on the land about the cities, then it would be equally easy for those farmers who are better adapted for city life to get near the cities.

Under present conditions, where the worker is forced out fifteen or twenty miles from the town by the high price of land and the large amount of land required, the farmer is as much cut off from the city as the city dweller is cut off from rural life.

We need not be afraid to teach men better ways; there will always be plenty too stupid or too old or too isolated to learn; these will remain a bulwark against too sudden change.

Dr. Engel, former head of the Prussian Statistical Bureau, informs us that "Scientific farming succeeds because a given amount of effort, when more intelligently directed, produces greater results.

Inasmuch, then, as the amount of food which the world can consume is limited, the smaller will be the number of farmers required to produce the needed supply, and the larger will be the number driven from the country to the city. It has already been observed that if 34 scientific methods were universally adopted in the United States, doubtless one half of those now engaged in agriculture could produce the present crops, which would compel the other half to abandon the farm." This is "Engel's Law."

This "argument" a.s.sumes that we are now utilizing all the land possible and that every one is fully supplied with food. But when we consider the great ma.s.ses of people in the slums of all cities who are always underfed and whose constant thought is about their next meal; when we see hundreds of able-bodied men waiting in line until midnight for half a loaf of stale bread, surely it seems that there is a possibility of keeping all of the present farmers at work, if not of finding new fields for others, if we make our conditions such that there will be opportunities for every able-bodied worker to labor at remunerative employment.

Professor L. H. Bailey, a most industrious and accurate observer, says: "Dr. Engel's argument rests on the a.s.sumption that agriculture produces only or chiefly food; but probably more than half of the agricultural products of the United States is not food.

It is cotton, flax, hemp, wool, hides, timber, tobacco, dyes, drugs, flowers, ornamental trees and plants, horses, pets, and fancy stock, and hundreds of other non-edible commodities. The total food produce of the United States, according to the twelfth census, was $1,837,000. The cost of material used in the three industries of textile, lumber and leather manufactories alone was $1,851,000,000.

"Dr. Engel thinks that the outlay for subsistence diminishes as income increases; but comforts and luxuries increase in intimate ratio with the income, and the larger part of these come from the farm and forest. Dr. Engel, in fact, allows this, for he says that 'sundries become greater as income increases."'

We have already abundance of information about almost every county in the Union, published by Boards of Trade and land boomers, like the following about "Oxnard, Ventura County, the center of the famous lima bean district in California. For a year the returns from farm products alone, in this vicinity, are estimated at over $2,000,000. The sugar factory, which uses 2000 tons of beets every twenty-four hours, requires the yield of about 1900 acres every season. The beet crop is rotated with beans, and the factory's supply is kept good by systematic methods. Two thousand head of cattle are being fattened at the present time in the company's yard on the beet pulp. Much of the pulp is also sold to local stockmen, who value it highly for feed. The factory turns out 5000 bags of sugar every day." And again:

"Eastern farm lands steadily declined in price up to about 1902, so that Eastern land sold for less than Western land of the same quality and of like situation; but the tide seems at last to have turned, and much money is now being made in buying up cheap farms and especially in sub-dividing them for small cultivators."

That sort of thing is interesting; but it is not what a man wants to know--he is anxious to learn how much he can make and where and how to do it.

The man who seeks a comfortable living will do better to rent on long lease or buy a few acres convenient to trolley or railroad communication with a city; besides the returns which will come to the farmer from the use of a few acres, if he is the owner he will get a constant increase in the value of the land, due to the growth of the city. If the city grows out so that the land becomes too valuable to farm, he will be well paid for leaving.

(Although progress is continually forcing laborers back upon less desirable land, their loss, unless they are the owners, is the landowner's gain.)