This took about eight days’ work, nearly all with a wheel hoe.

Remember about the present increased and changing prices and costs?  At the present writing, 1917, the advances in costs and prices would probably average about three quarters, and those of common labor perhaps one third over those given in the text.  In other respects, the instances and authorities, still pertinent, have been retained in this revision.

It would have been waste, not thrift, to get a new authority to tell us that straw makes the cleanest mulch for strawberries; that’s the reason they were called strawberries; and they grew just the same way ten years ago.

L. E. Dimosh of Connecticut raised on one quarter of an acre $146.21, of which over $85 was profit.

In other cases the profits were $142 (Gianque, Nebraska) per acre; and over $295 (Dora Dietrich, Pennsylvania); with the rather exceptional profit at the rate of $570 (Mrs. Hall, Connecticut).  Some showed a loss.

Some of the town or city lots yielded very high profits; one of a third of an acre gave a profit of $224.33 (Edge Darlington, Md.).

The summary “based upon the reports of five hundred and fifteen gardens in nearly every state and territory and in Canada and the provinces, may be considered accurate and reliable.  Covering such a vast territory local conditions are avoided.”  It shows that “the average size of farm gardens was 24,372 square feet, or about half an acre, the average labor cost $26.34, the average value of product was at the rate of $170 per acre, and the net profit over $80 per acre.”

To get results we must first learn and then teach what we know.  The finest game in the world is to teach.  No one ever knows anything thoroughly till he tries to teach it.

When you tell a person how to do a thing, he doesn’t know how to do it himself.  When you show him how to do it, still he doesn’t know that he could do it himself.  But when you get him to do it himself, then he knows.

Country boys will believe that early tomatoes can be raised by starting them in the house; but like the rest of us they don’t know how to do it, and when spring comes and it is time to do such things, they are busy on the farm.  There are several schools trying the experience of allowing the children to plant in window boxes in early April and are showing them how to do it.  But as there is not room for all the children to plant in these window boxes, there is a new idea which originated in the country, where the children are engaged in the fall and the spring assisting their parents at agricultural work.

It was hard to get up any interest in school gardens, but it was all the more important that they should have agricultural instruction in the winter time.

At Berkeley Heights, N. J., we devised this simple plan, and it works.  We made a number of wooden boxes, one foot wide, two feet long, so they will just fit on the ledge of a school desk.  They are only three inches deep, with a bottom of tin, turned up at the edges, or of well painted pine, white-leaded at the joints.  There is no drainage, since we discovered that if they are not watered too much, they do better without drainage.  The holes usually made in the bottoms of flower boxes carry off a lot of plant food with the water that runs through.