ollyhocks. Green
peas are only really green for about two hours. Before that they are
young peas; after that they are old peas. Cucumbers are the worst case
of all. They change overnight, from delicate little bulbs obviously too
slight and dainty to pick, to old cases of yellow leather filled with
seeds.

If I were ever to garden again, a thing which is out of the bounds of
possibility, I should wait until a certain day and hour when all the
plants were ripe, and then go out with a gun and shoot them all dead, so
that they could grow no more.

But calculation, I repeat, is the bane of gardening. I knew, among our
group of food producers, a party of young engineers, college men,
who took an empty farm north of the city as the scene of their summer
operations. They took their coats off and applied college methods. They
ran out, first, a base line AB, and measured off from it lateral
spurs MN, OP, QR, and so on. From these they took side angles with a
theodolite so as to get the edges of each of the separate plots of
their land absolutely correct. I saw them working at it all through one
Saturday afternoon in May. They talked as they did it of the peculiar
ignorance of the so-called practical farmer. He never--so they
agreed--uses his head. He never--I think I have their phrase
correct--stops to think. In laying out his ground for use, it never
occurs to him to try to get the maximum result from a given space. If
a farmer would only realize that the contents of a circle represent the
maximum of space enclosable in a given perimeter, and that a circle is
merely a function of its own radius, what a lot of time he would save.

These young men that I speak of laid out their field engineer-fashion
with little white posts at even distances. They made a blueprint of the
whole thing as they planted it. Every corner of it was charted out. The
yield was calculated to a nicety. They had allowed for the fact that
some of the stuff might fail to grow by introducing what they called "a
coefficient of error." By means of this and by reducing the variation of
autumn prices to a mathematical curve, those men not only knew already
in the middle of May the exact yield of their farm to within half a
bushel (they allowed, they said, a variation of half a bushel per fifty
acres), but they knew beforehand within a few cents the market value
that they would receive. The figures, as I remember them, were simply
amazing. It seemed incredible tha