“My garden, to begin with, was in the most rudimentary condition, having been allowed to run to grass.  After digging up a spot about ten feet square in the turf, taking the early morning for the work, I decided that it would require all summer to get the garden fairly spaded up, so I hired a stalwart Irishman to do the work for me, which he did in a week, charging me nine dollars for the job.  As he professed to be also an expert in planting vegetables, I bought a supply of seeds in the city and intrusted them to him, assuring myself that once in the ground the rest of the work would fall to me; if I could not keep a garden patch fifty feet square clear of weeds, I had better abandon the business at once, and all hopes of making a living out of scientific gardening.  The beginning was an unfortunate one.  The weather happened to be first very wet, and then so dry and hot that my vegetables were unable to break their way through the baked earth.  When my peas and beans still gave no signs after being in the ground for two weeks, I discovered that the whole work would have to be done over again.  A Presidential campaign was beginning, which kept me in town often late at night, so that the chief labor of the garden fell to my faithful Irishman, who got far more satisfaction out of it than I did.  The vegetables finally did come up above the surface, and many an evening I finished a hard day’s work by pumping and carrying hundreds of gallons of water to pour upon potato plants, tomatoes, beans, and other things which a friend of mine, an expert in such matters, assured me were curiosities of malformation and backwardness.  My Irishman told me that it was all for want of manure, and by his advice I bought six dollars’ worth of manure from a neighboring stable, and had it spread over the ground.  The bills for my garden were meanwhile mounting up.  I had begun the spring with a garden ledger, keeping an accurate account of every penny spent, and hoping to put on the other side of the page a tremendous list of fine vegetables.  The accounts are before me now, and I presume that every one who has been through the same experience has preserved some such record.”  (Naturally, if he began that way.) ("Liberty and a Living,” by P. G. Hubert.)

If your idea of farming is to bury “some seeds” in untilled ground, regardless of suitability, and “wait till they come up,” you will wait in vain for a decent crop.

Says Professor Roberts in the “Farmstead” (Macmillan), “Mushrooms sell at fifty cents per pound; maize for one half cent per pound.  Why?  Because anybody, even a squaw, can raise maize, but only a specially skilled gardener can succeed in mushroom culture.”

But enough has been said to show that you must cultivate with brains.  The Germans say, “What your head won’t do, your legs have to.”

“We’ll have a little farm,
A pig, a horse and cow
And you will drive the wagon
While I drive the plow,”