ut in a row of a better
standard early variety. How we watch those rows for the first sprouts!
How we coddle and cultivate them! How eagerly we inspect our
neighbors' rows, trying to appear nonchalant! And doubtless how silly
this sounds to anyone who is not a gardener. Last summer we got our
first mess of peas on June twenty-first, and after eating a spoonful,
we rushed to the telephone, and were about to ring, when somebody
called us. "Hello," we said into the transmitter. A voice on the other
end of the wire, curiously choked and munchy, cried, "We are eating
our first peas! My mouth's full of 'em now!"

"That's nothing," we answered, "we've got our first mouthful all
swallowed."

"Well, anyhow," said our disappointed neighbor, "I called up first!
Good-bye."

How is that for a neck-and-neck finish at the tape?

As April waxes into May, the garden beds are a perpetual adventure in
the expected, each morning bringing some new revelation of old friends
come back, and as you dig deep and prepare the beds for the annuals,
or spade manure around the perennials, or set your last year's
plantings of hollyhocks, larkspur, foxgloves and campanulas into their
places, you move tenderly amid the aspiring red stalks of the peonies,
the Jason's crop of green iris spears, the leaves of tulips and
narcissuses and daffodils, the fresh green of tiny sweet William
plants clustered 'round the mother plant like a brood of chicks around
the hen. You must be at setting them into borders, too, or putting the
surplus into flats and then telephoning your less fortunate friends.
One of the joys of a garden is in giving away your extra plants and
seedlings.

One morning the asparagus bed, already brown again after the April
showers have driven the salt into the ground, is pricked with short
tips. That is a luscious sight! Inch by inch they push up, and thick
and fast they come at last, and more and more and more. My diary shows
me that we ate our first bunch last year on May ninth. On that day,
also, I learn from the same source, the daffodils were out, the Darwin
tulips were budding, and we spent the afternoon burning caterpillars'
nests in the orchard--one spring crop which is never welcome, and
never winter-killed. At this date, too, we are hard at work spraying,
and sowing the annuals out-of-doors in the seed beds, and planting
corn (the potatoes are all in by now), immediately following the
plowing, which was delayed till the first o