In the choice of a garden plot you may be restricted to a stiff, tenacious, heavy clay.  Now you have a miser to deal with—­a soil that retains, but in many cases makes no proper use of, what it receives.  Skill and good management, however, can improve any soil, and coax luxuriant crops from the most unpropitious.

We will speak first of the ideal soil already mentioned, and hope that the acre contains an area of it of suitable dimensions for a garden.  What should be the first step in this case?  Why, to get more of it.  A quarter of an acre can be made equal to half an acre.  You can about double the garden, without adding to it an inch of surface, by increasing the depth of good soil.  For instance, ground has been cultivated to the depth of six or seven inches.  Try the experiment of stirring the soil and enriching it one foot downward, or eighteen inches, or even two feet, and see what vast differences will result.  With every inch you go down, making all friable and fertile, you add just so much more to root pasturage.  When you wish to raise a great deal, increase your leverage.  Roots are your levers; and when they rest against a deep fertile soil they lift into the air and sunshine products that may well delight the eyes and palate of the most fastidious.  We suggest that this thorough deepening, pulverization, and enriching of the soil be done at the start, when the plow can be used without any obstructions.  If there are stones, rocks, roots, anything which prevents the treatment which a garden plot should receive, there is a decided advantage in clearing them all out at the beginning.  Last fall I saw a half-acre that was swampy, and so encumbered with stones that one could walk all over it without stepping off the rocks.  The land was sloping, and therefore capable of drainage.  The proprietor put three men to work on the lower side with picks, shovels, and blasting-tools.  They turned the soil over to the depth of eighteen inches, taking out every stone larger than a walnut.  Eight or ten feet apart deep ditches were cut, and the stones, as far as possible, placed in these.  The rest were carted away for a heavy wall.  You may say it was expensive work.  So it was; yet so complete a garden spot was made that I believe it would yield a fair interest in potatoes alone.  I relate this instance to show what can be done.  A more forbidding area for a garden in its original state could scarcely be found.  Enough vegetables and fruit can be raised from it hereafter, with annual fertilizing, to supply a large family, and it will improve every year under the refining effects of frost, sun, and cultivation.