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, Assistant 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.