In deciding upon the place for the home vegetable garden it is well to dispose once & for all of the old idea that the garden “patch” must be an scary spot in the home surroundings. If thoughtfully planned, carefully planted & soundly cared for, it may be made a beautiful and harmonious feature of the general scheme, lending a touch of comfortable homeliness that no shrubs, borders, or beds can ever produce.

With this fact in mind we will not feel limited to any part of the premises merely because it is out of sight behind the barn or garage. In the small moderate-sized place there will not be much choice as to land. It will be required to take what is to be had and then do the very best that can be done with it. But there will probably be a good deal of option as to, first, exposure, and second, convenience. Other things being equal, select a spot near at hand, easy of access. It may seem that a difference of only a few hundred yards will mean nothing, But if one is depending largely upon spare moments for working in and for watching the garden and in the growing of many vegetables the latter is almost as significant as the former this matter of favorable access will be of much greater importance than is likely to be at first recognized. Not until you have had to make a dozen time-wasting trips for forgotten seeds or tools, or gotten your feet soaking wet by going out through the dew-drenched grass, will you realize fully what this may mean.

Exposure.

However the most important thing is to consider in picking out the spot that is to yield you happiness & delicious vegetables all summer, or even for many years, is the exposure. Pick out the “earliest” spot you can find a plot sloping a little to the south or east, that seems to catch sunshine early and hold it late, and that seems to be out of the direct way of the chilling north & northeast winds. If a building, or even an old fence, protects it from this direction, your garden will be helped along marvelously, for an early start is a great big factor toward success. If it is not already protected, a board fence, or a hedge of some low-growing bushes or young evergreen plants, will add very greatly to its usefulness. The importance of having such a protective cover or shelter is completely underrated by the unprofessional.

The soil.

The chances are that you will not find a spot of ideal garden soil ready for use anywhere upon your place. However all except the very cheapest of soils can be brought up to a very high degree of productiveness particularly such small areas as home vegetable gardens demand. Large tracts of soil that are almost pure sand, & others so heavy and sloppy that for centuries they lay uncultivated, have frequently been brought, in the course of only a few years, to where they yield annually tremendous crops on a commercial basis. So do not be disheartened about your soil. Proper handling of it is much more essential, and a garden- patch of average run-down, or “never-brought-up” soil will produce much more for the energetic & careful gardener than the richest spot will grow under limited methods of cultivation.

The ideal garden soil is a “rich, sandy loam.” & the fact cannot be overemphasized that such soils usually are made, not found. Let us analyze that description a bit, for right here we come to the first of the four essential factors of gardening food. The others are cultivation, moisture and temperature. “Rich” in the gardener’s vocabulary means full of plant food; more than that & this is a point of vital importance it means full of plant food ready to be used at once, all prepared & spread out on the garden table, or preferably in it, where growing things can at once make use of it; or what we term, in one word, “available” plant food. Practically no soils in long- inhabited communities remain naturally rich enough to produce big crops. They are made rich, or kept rich, in two ways; first, by cultivation, which helps to change the raw plant food stored in the soil into obtainable forms; and second, by manuring or adding plant food to the soil from outside sources.

“Sandy” in the sense here used, means a soil comprising enough particles of sand so that water will pass through it without leaving it pasty and sticky a few days after a rain; “light” enough, as it is called, so that a handful, under ordinary conditions, will crumble and fall apart promptly after being pressed in the hand. It is not essential that the soil be sandy in appearance, However it should be crumbly.

“Loam: a rich, friable soil,” says Webster. That barely covers it, but it does identify it. It is soil in which the sand and clay are in particular proportions, so that neither greatly predominate, and usually dark in color, from cultivation & enrichment. Such a soil, even to the untrained eye, just naturally looks as if it would grow things. It is remarkable how quickly the whole physical appearance of a piece of well cultivated ground will change. An instance came under my notice last fall in one of my fields, where a strip containing an acre had been two years in onions, and a little piece jutting off from the middle of this had been prepared for them just one season. The rest had not received any extra manuring or cultivation. When the field was ploughed up in the fall, all three sections were as distinctly marked as though sorted by a fence. And I know that next spring’s crop of rye, before it is ploughed under, will show the lines of demarcation just as plainly.