While in quantity and quality the least favored acre could be made to produce as much as one best situated, yet, almost none of its production would be available to sell, while the product of the favorably located acre could be sold as rapidly as grown.

CHAPTER VIII

THE KITCHEN GARDEN

The aim of the kitchen garden is to provide an abundance and variety of food for the family.  As the object of the cultivator is to get the largest product for his labor, he ought to produce all that he can consume on the least possible area.  Though one may go into mushrooms or frog raising as a money crop, the kitchen garden is the first indispensable and should first be given attention.

For a garden choose a piece of land with a southern exposure, sheltered on the north and west by woods, buildings, hedge, or any kind of a windbreak.  This arrangement will give the earliest garden, for it gets all the sun there is.  By running the rows north and south, the rays of the sun strike the eastern side of the row in the morning, and the western side in the afternoon.

The best time to take hold of a piece of land is in the fall, because then it can be plowed ready for the spring planting.  The alternate freezing and thawing during the winter breaks up the sod and the stiff lumps thrown up by the plow, so rendering the soil pliable and easily worked.  This is especially true of land that has been reclaimed from the forest, or which has not been farmed for many years.

Before the plowing is done, the land for the garden should be manured at the rate of twenty-five large wagon loads to the acre.  If you can get a suitable plot that has been in red clover, alfalfa, soy beans, or cowpeas for a number of years, so much the better.  These plants have on their roots nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which draw nitrogen from the air.  Nitrogen is the great meat-maker and forces a prolonged and rapid growth of all vegetables.

After manuring and plowing, harrow repeatedly with a disk or cutaway harrow until the soil is as fine as dust.  Then you have a seed bed which will give the fine roots a chance to grow as soon as the seeds sprout.  Too much stress cannot be laid upon the importance of thoroughly working the soil at this time.  Every stone, weed, or clod that is left in the soil destroys to that extent the source from which the plants can get their food.

A quarter-acre garden, which is big enough to supply the whole family with a succession of vegetables for summer and fall, as well as some potatoes and turnips for winter, will take a diligent workman about four days to dig over and three days to plant.  The four days’ work of digging will need to be done only once.  The time spent upon planting succession crops will depend upon the amount of the garden reserved for rotation.  The part kept for lettuce, radishes, spinach, beets, Swiss chard, peas, string and wax beans