St. Nicholas/Volume 40/Number 10/Hunger and Food
GARDEN-MAKING AND SOME OF THE GARDEN’S STORIES
IV. THE STORY OF HUNGER AND FOOD
BY GRACE TABOR
“Perhaps if we went on hunger strike,” she had said, in a menacing tone, “a little attention might be paid to our bill of fare, and we should get what we want!”
Almost at once, however, the few scattered, blue-blooded, aristocratic, and very elegant Spencers shook their dainty heads until the frills of their great caps and ruffs fluttered as they do when a breeze plays over them; and the countess herself, speaking at last in her silvery, high-bred voice, put a quiet but firm veto on any such method of protest, Yet she was not in the least unkind, nor did she do it in a way to make the underbred Miss Salvia feel hurt or snubbed, though I must say the latter was scarlet when she finished, and showed unmistakable signs of realizing the bad taste of her attitude.
“A great deal of attention is paid to our menus,” said the countess, gently; “I am sure we cannot fail to be aware of that, And those charged with our care are not indifferent, by any means. Of course, therefore, we none of us can entertain for an instant, I am sure, any proposal to increase their anxiety, nor can we cherish a wish to follow any line of conduct that is plainly annoying or unkind or inconsiderate.”
It was a very long speech, even for a countess, and she leaned back with a little sigh that set her dainty pink [rills a-quiver again, looking altogether so lovely and delicate and fragile that every one present could hardly keep from shouting with delight at the vision of her, even while they could have wept at the cruel circumstance which was depriving her, as well as themselves, of health and strength.
“You need n't talk! The very idea of your complaining,” whispered the admiral, indignantly, fairly withering Miss Salvia with his fierce glance; “why, you can eat anything and thrive on it; sweet, sour, or savory, it ’s all the same to you.
She did not answer, but looked very sulky however, no one saw, for they were all so interested in the countess’s proposal.
“And they will come to understand, I am sure,” she was saying, as the admiral turned back from the scolding he had delivered, “if we just behave, and make the best of what we have. They are blundering the bills of fare dreadfully; but if they keep trying, they must soon strike on the right thing, for they will have gone right through the list.”
And that very night her prophecy came true. For a big sage came to visit, and he walked about the garden with the little sage, admiring, criticizing, and advising. And finally he said: “Heigh-o! Your Spencer hybrids are all running to vine, are n’t they?
“Well, there are n’t as many flowers as I thought they ’d have,” was the reluctant admission; “but they ’ve had lots of fertilizer,”
“Aha, that ’s just the point!” said the big sage. “They have been overfed till their digestions are so troublesome that they can’t do any fine work, like making blossoms, to save their lives. Look at this Countess Spencer; why, it ought to be covered with flowers as big as little orchids; but there are barely a score here, and they ‘re small at that.”
“Well, how ’s a fellow to know about everything, Uncle Ned?” demanded the small sage, disconsolately, Whereat Uncle Ned laughed, and said “How, indeed!” most sympathetically. For he remembered all the perplexing things of his own big garden at home, and haw many times he had asked himself that very same question during the years he had been making it.
When we consider how very important eating is to boys and girls and men and women and dogs and cats and horses, and every living thing, we can begin to realize how very important it is to plants; and thus we can perhaps understand how necessary it is for us, who are housekeepers and caterers lo them, as well as special policemen, really to know what to include in their diet list. Think how ill we should be if we had nothing given us to eat but cake and candy; no bread and butter, no nice salads, no fruits, but just rich chocolate cake for breakfast, and richer fig-cake for luncheon, and then some marshmallows for tea, perhaps, with a bite of sponge-cake before we went to bed! Or suppose we had to live on lemons, rhubarb, and vinegar How dreadful! Yet this is exactly the way we sometimes feed our plants—and then wonder why they do not thrive.
The first thing to be learned about plant catering is this: all plants do not eat the same quantities of all kinds of food. Most fertilizers—which is the name we have given to plant-foods generally, just as we call our own foods “groceries” have the three essentials which are necessary to keep plants alive. But some contain more of one and less of the others, while some plants need less of one, perhaps, and more of the others. So just giving all plants generally “plenty of fertilizer” is not at all what the skilled gardener or the thoughtful gardener does. He watches to see what they need, and then he supplies them with that particular thing,
The Spencer hybrid sweet-peas, for instance, need a great deal of nitrogen, as do all the members of the pea family; but too much of this, which makes leaves and branches grow at a perfectly tremendous rate, turns the plant all into vine, and does not help it the least bit in the world in the making of flowers.
We cannot go over the list of all the plants which may be growing in your garden, and learn especially what each one needs the most; that might be a pretty big task, but we can learn just what each of the most important plant-foods does for the plant, after we are sure that the one great fact of plants not all eating alike, which I have just mentioned, is understood, And then we should be able to tell pretty accurately what any particular plant lacks, if it does lack something, by the symptoms which it displays.
These three principal things that plants live upon—that are to them what meat and vegetables and sugar are to humans—are nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash; and in the order in which they are here named they encourage and stimnlate, respectively, top growth—that is, leaf and branch and green generally—flowers, and woody growth and fruit. And they are furnished to the plant, the first by nitrate of soda, as it comes in the powder from the drug-store, or by cotton-seed meal, or by what is called green fertilizing—which I shall tell you about presently—and by stable manure; the second by ground bone, bone-ash, bone meal, and all the “bone” products advertised for sale by dealers in fertilizer, also by the rock from South Carolina’s phosphate beds, which is called “floats”; and the third by sulphate of potash, or the German stuff called “Kainite,” or unleached hardwood ashes,
All this is a good deal to remember, is n’t it? So I am going to put it in the form of a little table that will tell you, at a glance, the whole story; and will tell you, also, how much of each of these three things should be used when a combination that is a “complete” fertilizer is desired.
| Name of plant food |
Part of plant helped |
Where obtained | Proportion for a complete fertilizer |
| Nitrogen | Leaf, branch, and green generally |
Nitrate of soda; cotton-seed meal; green fertilizers; stable manure |
1 part or 1 pound |
| Phosphoric acid |
Flowers | Bone-ash and bone products; “floats” |
2 parts or 2 pounds |
| Potash | Woody growth and fruit |
Sulphate of potash; hardwood ashes; “Kainite” |
2½ to 3 parts or 2½ to 3 pounds |
Now if the sweet-peas are lacking in blossom, as with the Spencer hybrids in the garden we have just been reading about, and they have “run all to vine,” as the saying goes, it is perfectly evident that they do not need any more of the things that have nitrogen in them; but that one of the things that contain phosphoric acid is what they crave—bone meal or some of the ground phosphatic rock. But when it comes to maturing seed—that is, to making frut—even this will not be enough, for it is potash, as the table shows very plainly, which helps along the plant at this particular time and part of its work. So all three are necessary, you see, for the garden’s general welfare. But where flowers especially are to be fed, phosphoric acid is always the thing most needed. Hence ground bone is the one thing most commonly in use in greenhouses and by florists, and the one thing that all flower gardeners should have at hand.
The green fertilizer which we have spoken about, and which is one of the things that contains a great deal of nitrogen, furnishes a very slow way of doing things, and one you will not care about trying right away, I expect. But it is one of the very best methods that there is of treating a large tract of land; and when you grow up to be a farmer (?), you will, of course, want to know about it! So I may as well tell you here. It is raising a crop of clover, soy-beans, cow-peas, or any kind of legume on it (a legume is a plant whose seeds are contained in a pod that splits open into two pieces, just as bean-pods or pea-pods do), letting this crop grow to maturity, and blossom, and form its rich mealy seeds; and then plowing or spading it under, vine, seeds, and all! This takes down into the soil a very great amount of nitrogen, which this particular kind of plant stores up in large quantities in its seeds and even in its roots, besides the humus, or vegetable mold, of the stalks and roots—and humus is most desirable, because it helps retain moisture in the ground, and makes the soil light and porous, so that roots can penetrate it easily. This is one reason why stable manure ought always to be used when working over the ground, even though some chemical fertilizer is to be added later. The tiny particles of broken up straw and hay in it all disintegrate and become humus. Never put manure onto the lawn, however, nor onto the surface of the ground anywhere, for it is always full of weed seeds, and these will overrun everything in no time at all, ruining the turf and making the garden a perfect plague-spot. Use it only when the early work of turning over the soil is going on, so that it can be turned under the surface by spading or plowing. Then these wretched little seeds will be buried so deep, they simply cannot sprout,
Use generally for flowers a combination of just the ground hone and sulphate of potash, leaving out nitrogen altogether, except for that which the manure, used in making the beds in the beginning, furnishes to them. Use four parts of the bone to one part of the potash, and be sure that they are well mixed, This mixture you can then put on the ground at the rate of one ounce to every four square feet of bed or border or garden space of any kind. If you have no way of weighing it, measure it with a table-spoon. It takes about a table-spoonful and a half to make an ounce—perhaps a little less, but this is near enough. Thus, for a border two feet wide and ten feet long, which will contain twenty square feet, it would take five ounces, or seven and one-half table-spoonfuls.
This is usually put on in the spring, but the ground can be lightly stirred up around the plants at any time with a small hand weeder, and an application made if they seem to need it. I am putting it now around some lilac bushes that did not blossom this year, so they may feast on it while they are growing and making preparations for next summer. They shall have some more in the fall too, just as they are going to sleep, enough to leave some for breakfast the first thing next spring.
You will often hear about using lime in the soil, and you must know what this does and why it is necessary, even though it is not a direct food for plants, as the other things are. First of all, it sweetens the soil—sil can be very sour, you know, just the same as anything else, and some plants detest sour soil—and then it acts directly upon the little dirt particles that make up the soil, so that where these are small and packed close, as in heavy clay, they separate and lie farther apart; and the clay becomes consequently lighter, and we call it more “friable,” that is, it crumbles or breaks up into powder easily; and where they are coarse and far apart, as in sandy soil, they somehow break up and fit closer together, thus making the soil more dense, and changing its texture to a loam. So once in a while the garden beds and borders ought to have lime—every third or fourth year, perhaps; and this should always be put in when the ground is broken up, before planting. Use two to eight ounces for every four square feet—that is, from four to sixteen table-spoonfuls, for lime weighs a little less than ground bone, and it takes, therefore, a little more to make an ounce. A border two feet wide and ten feet long would need ten to forty ounces, or twenty to eighty table-spoonfuls—which is quite a job of measuring, is it not? The larger amount is for heavy clay; the smaller for light, sandy soil; and you will find it easy to tell the middle kinds, between clay and sand, that will need from twenty to thirty ounces, or a pound and a half, roughly speaking. You will not have to be as exact about any of these things as you would be with baking-powder and butter and sugar when making a cake.
Collect the lawn clippings during the hot weather and spread them around all your garden plants, to protect the earth above their roots from baking under the sun, as well as to keep the moisture from being drawn up out of it. This mulch of clippings acts just the same as the loose earth or dust mulch about which I told you a while ago—and it saves the work of going all over the ground to loosen it up and make a dust mulch. Then the clippings, as they disintegrate, work their way down into the earth and improve the soil by adding their little bit of humus, and may be spaded under when the time for spading comes around again.
It is not too late to make the seed-bed which I told you about last month, if you have not made it yet, nor to sow the seed of perennials for next year’s garden in it, if you do it at once. Whether you do this or not, however, keep everything tidy, and all old flower heads cut off. Pile them in a heap, with the rakings from the lawn that are not needed to mulch the flowers. These will be the beginning of a compost heap which you shall hear about later. Keep well on guard and be very, very watchful for Rosycoats and Greenjackets!
