books lay stress on the
need of "a deep, friable loam full of nitrogen." This I have never seen.
My own plot of land I found on examination to contain nothing but earth.
I could see no trace of nitrogen. I do not deny the existence of loam.
There may be such a thing. But I am admitting now in all humility of
mind that I don't know what loam is. Last spring my fellow gardeners and
I all talked freely of the desirability of "a loam." My own opinion is
that none of them had any clearer ideas about it than I had. Speaking
from experience, I should say that the only soils are earth, mud and
dirt. There are no others.

But I leave out the soil. In any case we were mostly forced to disregard
it. Perhaps a more fruitful source of failure even than the lack of loam
was the attempt to apply calculation and mathematics to gardening. Thus,
if one cabbage will grow in one square foot of ground, how many cabbages
will grow in ten square feet of ground? Ten? Not at all. The answer is
_one_. You will find as a matter of practical experience that however
many cabbages you plant in a garden plot there will be only _one_ that
will really grow. This you will presently come to speak of as _the
_cabbage. Beside it all the others (till the caterpillars finally finish
their existence) will look but poor, lean things. But _the_ cabbage will
be a source of pride and an object of display to visitors; in fact it
would ultimately have grown to be a _real_ cabbage, such as you buy for
ten cents at any market, were it not that you inevitably cut it and eat
it when it is still only half-grown.

This always happens to the one cabbage that is of decent size, and to
the one tomato that shows signs of turning red (it is really a feeble
green-pink), and to the only melon that might have lived to ripen. They
get eaten. No one but a practised professional gardener can live and
sleep beside a melon three-quarters ripe and a cabbage two-thirds grown
without going out and tearing it off the stem.

Even at that it is not a bad plan to eat the stuff while you can. The
most peculiar thing about gardening is that all of a sudden everything
is too old to eat. Radishes change over night from delicate young shoots
not large enough to put on the table into huge plants seven feet high
with a root like an Irish shillelagh. If you take your eyes off a
lettuce bed for a week the lettuces, not ready to eat when you last
looked at them, have changed into a tall jungle of h