The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1914-04-18
AS MAN TO man.

This home garden plan Of the Topeka
school board has wide scope. It
seems to take. It bids fair to grow to
broad and useful proportions. Yester-
day the newspaper man came home
and found the tow-headed boy, aged
9, out in the backyard with a spade
bigger than he Is, trying to dig a gar
den..
!, The boy had a bed about the size
Of bandana handkerchief dug up
and he pointed to it with q pride that
passeth all understanding.
He was going to plant radishes in
that bed, he said. and maybe a row of
lettuce and a beet or two.
Answering the why and wherefores
put to him by the newspaper man, he
declared that it was part of the regu-
lar school course. That the teacher
wanted it and the board approved it.
They want every boy to dig with a
spade and plant little seeds in the
ground to grow This boy was excited
over the matter and he was enthusi-
astic regarding the probable product
OF his labors in the vineyard-or back
yard.
Some way or other the picture of
the small boy and the big spade and
the little bed set the newspaper man
to thinking. He himself had never
planted a foot Of ground in his life.
multiply and replenish the earth. He
never grasped the pillow handle or
Weeded radish patch or prayed for
rain or blessed the sunshine that made
any part of his backyard to plant a
potato in the hole. He never trained
q pea vine over a crooked stick or
shooed bug away from a little green
tomato or watched the sun paint that
tomato red. These joys have been
lost tn hin, he
them in this mortal coil. But the boy
with the very light brown hair will
know them. This boy went to school
and caught the garden fever. He came
home and dug with his trusty spade
and now he will never get over it.
In few weeks that boy will drag
the newspaper man out in the back
yard to see the radishes in bloom.
This garden business is good thing.
1t tends to show a boy that there are
other important things in the world
besides tops and marbles and baseball.
OF course the boy will eat these rad
lsheS and get the tummy ache But
he will have had the consciousness
that he made radish grow where
there was no radish before. He has
been party to a miracle. His weak
little hands placed dead seed where
1t would live again and grow into
green leaves and reproduce it's kind so
that men can live.
1OC rev boys learn to plant these
days. and the result is the high cost Of
living. The Harvest Home song beats
Mendelssohn's Spring Song to death
and the arias from the old Polack
masters cannot hold a candle to it.
| The newspaper man does not eat
radishes but he hopes that boys rad
ish bed will blossom like the Empress
GATHERINGS rose. He hopes that every
school boy in town will plant radishes,
onions. tomatoes. string beans and
| peas, and that their harvest will fill
| the granaries against seven years of
| famine.
When a useful idea strikes a nine
year-old boy SO hard that he will leave
the ball game on the corner and the
bull pup on the porch and go out in
the back yard and toll with spade,
the propagation of that idea is as good
II not better than teaching that boy
things from books. Everyone at that
boys house is strong for hrs radish
patch except the bull pup. He thinks
he Is being deserted without cause and
he refuses to be comforted C.