El Paso herald. (El Paso, Tex.) 1901-1931, 1910-04-21
y PRINGTIME is gardening time TOT

~ - liiIlc L "
~ him who makes a business Of
farming, and to him who depends
for his livelihood upon the produce of
a truck garden. the advent of spring
may mean nothing more than the open
ing of a business season. But at some
time or other the ancestors of all of us
have titled the fields: and when the
winter breaks, and the grass begins to
show green, and the trees bud, then our
inheritance makes itself felt in the
blood.
Consequently everybody wants to
make a garden, and the more impos
sible this feat the greater is the desire.
The dweller in city flats sees only the
joy and the romance of digging in the
smelly earth and planting the seeds
which promise so many dainty dishes in
the by and by.
Those persons actually near TO the
soil, especially young American gentle
men oser 10 and under 16 years old,
living in rural communities, take a diff
ferent view of the situation To them
making garden means simply onerous
and disagreeable toll, interfering with
the serious business of life. which is,
of course, the playing of baseball
Gardening a Great Business
But this year, more than ever before
in the United States, the business of
making a garden has most serious
aspect One of the visible results of
the present era of high prices of food
Is the steady increase in the number
Of city people who are moving TO the
suburbs for the purpose of owning a
garden which will furnish a goodly
proportion of the food TO be consumed
upon the family table.
The public school garden and the va
cant lot farm have given great num-
Der of city girls and boys some prac-
tical training in gardening. and they
can manage the little suburban home
plat Will. tie koad of the house is al
work in the city. thereby materially
reducing the amount of the grocery
bill
Productive Miracles.
Veritable miracles of production have
been wrought by suburbanite garden
ers. One of the most attractive stories
of this kind is that of two boys who
were the sons of a minister. He was
the pastor of a poverty stricken congre-
cation. and his salary was so small that
it had TO be supplemented in some way.
The boys were youngsters OF that age
when baseball on the back lot is tn.
chief summer interest, but they were
made Of the stuff that gave them de-
sire to be useful in the solution of tbs
problems financial that engaged the
AuAAQ VI l4clI CLERICAL ldIQcE.
So they persuaded him to vacate the
manse and take a little house and gar
den plot which rented for s120 a year.
They had no horse, wagon nor pillow,
so they exchanged their own labor
when it could be spared from their
truck patches, for the use Of these
thtrgs. They planted one acre in GU
cuE-bers, half an acre each in cabbages,
melons. potatoes and popcorn. and
~hr-1a f~v,- -,
with an acre and a quarter in other
truck.
They sold the cucumbers for S115,
the cabbage for s3e. the melons for SOS.
the sweet corn for $50, and the Other
crops in proportion, 1913 in all. Mean
while the father was so delighted with
the sturdy industry OF his two half
grown boys that 1T counteracted the
evil effects of worry under the weight
Of financial cares, and the family was
restored to health and happiness.
From Poverty to Riches.
In another instance a Detroit man
who had ruined his health and broken
his fortune in an i'll starred country
newspaper venture, as q last resort took
charge of an old nursery that was al
most as poverty stricken as he was His
entire assets consisted of limited
amount of household furniture, one hoe.
sy, with chattel mortgage blanket
on ii, and $4,000 invested in baby girl
securities With less than half an acre
for garden purposes he raised $3.50
worth of produce. So strikingly sue
cessful was the little venture that 1t
brought a turn in the tide of his af-
fairs.
The agricultural press got hold of
the story, and now he and his Wife are
earning as much writing for the farm
papers as they are from their gardens.
which have grown to many times the
size of the original venture. And il was
all done on a little plot no larger than
vacant lot to be found almost any,
where in a city
Suburban Gardens
An experience meeting of people who
have tried suburban gardening on the
suburbanite scale is full of interest
One woman reports that she kept an &C
curate account OF the time required to
do her marketing and of the time she
spent in her garden after she had be-
bun to grow her own vegetables. She
found she could keep her garden in
fine trim in the same time that she had
spent going to market. Another woman
was unable TO swing an ordinary hoe
in her little garden of 40 feet square. so
she used an old butcher knife She de-
clares that 1t greatly benefited her
health and helped her pOcketbook at
the same time. One little boy planted
melon patch in sandy soil. and became
a very Croesus in the boy world as a
result