Author: Stephen Leacock
Category: Humorous
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XIV. Back from the Land
I have just come back now with the closing in of autumn--to the city. Ihave hung up my hoe in my study; my spade is put away behind the piano.I have with me seven pounds of Paris Green that I had over. Anybody whowants it may have it. I didn't like to bury it for fear of its poisoningthe ground. I didn't like to throw it away for fear of its destroyingcattle. I was afraid to leave it in my summer place for fear that itmight poison the tramps who generally break in in November. I have itwith me now. I move it from room to room, as I hate to turn my back uponit. Anybody who wants it, I repeat, can have it.
I should like also to give away, either to the Red Cross or to anythingelse, ten packets of radish seed (the early curled variety, I think),fifteen packets of cucumber seed (the long succulent variety, Ibelieve it says), and twenty packets of onion seed (the Yellow Danvers,distinguished, I understand, for its edible flavour and its nutritiousproperties). It is not likely that I shall ever, on this side of thegrave, plant onion seed again. All these things I have with me. Myvegetables are to come after me by freight. They are booked from SimcoeCounty to Montreal; at present they are, I believe, passing throughSchenectady. But they will arrive later all right. They were seen goingthrough Detroit last week, moving west. It is the first time that Iever sent anything by freight anywhere. I never understood before thewonderful organization of the railroads. But they tell me that there isa bad congestion of freight down South this month. If my vegetables gettangled up in that there is no telling when they will arrive.
In other words, I am one of the legion of men--quiet, determined,resolute men--who went out last spring to plant the land, and who arenow back.
With me--and I am sure that I speak for all the others as well--it wasnot a question of mere pleasure; it was no love of gardening for itsown sake that inspired us. It was a plain national duty. What we said toourselves was: "This war has got to stop. The men in the trenches thusfar have failed to stop it. Now let _us_ try. The whole thing," weargued, "is a plain matter of food production."
"If we raise enough food the Germans are bound to starve. Very good. Letus kill them."
I suppose there was never a more grimly determined set of men went outfrom the cities than those who went out last May, as I did, to conquerthe food problem. I don't mean to say that each and every one of usactually left the city. But we all "went forth" in the metaphoricalsense. Some of the men cultivated back gardens; others took vacant lots;some went out into the suburbs; and others, like myself, went right outinto the country.
We are now back. Each of us has with him his Paris Green, his hoe andthe rest of his radish seed.
The time has, therefore, come for a plain, clear statement of ourexperience. We have, as everybody knows, failed. We have been beatenhack all along the line. Our potatoes are buried in a jungle of autumnburdocks. Our radishes stand seven feet high, uneatable. Our tomatoes,when last seen, were greener than they were at the beginning of August,and getting greener every week. Our celery looked as delicate as amaidenhair fern. Our Indian corn was nine feet high with a tall featheryspike on top of that, but no sign of anything eatable about it from topto bottom.
I look back with a sigh of regret at those bright, early days in Aprilwhen we were all buying hoes, and talking soil and waiting for the snowto be off the ground. The street cars, as we went up and down toour offices, were a busy babel of garden talk. There was a sort offarmer-like geniality in the air. One spoke freely to strangers. Everyman with a hoe was a friend. Men chewed straws in their offices, andkept looking out of windows to pretend to themselves that they wereafraid it might blow up rain. "Got your tomatoes in?" one man would askanother as they went up in the elevator. "Yes, I got mine in yesterday,"the other would answer, "But I'm just a little afraid that this eastwind may blow up a little frost. What we need now is growing weather."And the two men would drift off together from the elevator door alongthe corridor, their heads together in friendly colloquy.
I have always regarded a lawyer as a man without a soul. There is onewho lives next door to me to whom I have not spoken in five years. Yetwhen I saw him one day last spring heading for the suburbs in a pair ofold trousers with a hoe in one hand and a box of celery plants in theother I felt that I loved the man. I used to think that stock-brokerswere mere sordid calculating machines. Now that I have seen whole firmsof them busy at the hoe, wearing old trousers that reached to theirarmpits and were tied about the waist with a polka dot necktie, I knowthat they are men. I know that there are warm hearts beating behindthose trousers.
Old trousers, I say. Where on earth did they all come from in such asudden fashion last spring? Everybody had them. Who would suspect thata man drawing a salary of ten thousand a year was keeping in reserve apair of pepper-and-salt breeches, four sizes too large for him, justin case a war should break out against Germany! Talk of Germanmobilization! I doubt whether the organizing power was all on their sideafter all. At any rate it is estimated that fifty thousand pairs of oldtrousers were mobilized in Montreal in one week.
But perhaps it was not a case of mobilization, or deliberatepreparedness. It was rather an illustration of the primitive instinctthat is in all of us and that will out in "war time." Any man worth thename would wear old breeches all the time if the world would let him.Any man will wind a polka dot tie round his waist in preference towearing patent braces. The makers of the ties know this. That iswhy they make the tie four feet long. And in the same way if anymanufacturer of hats will put on the market an old fedora, with a limprim and a mark where the ribbon used to be but is not--a hat guaranteedto be six years old, well weathered, well rained on, and certifiedto have been walked over by a herd of cattle--that man will make anddeserve a fortune.
These at least were the fashions of last May. Alas, where are they now?The men that wore them have relapsed again into tailor-made tweeds. Theyhave put on hard new hats. They are shining their boots again. They areshaving again, not merely on Saturday night, but every day. They aresinking back into civilization.
Yet those were bright times and I cannot forbear to linger on them.Nor the least pleasant feature was our rediscovery of the morning. Myneighbour on the right was always up at five. My neighbour on theleft was out and about by four. With the earliest light of day, littlecolumns of smoke rose along our street from the kitchen ranges whereour wives were making coffee for us before the servants got up. By sixo'clock the street was alive and busy with friendly salutations. Themilkman seemed a late comer, a poor, sluggish fellow who failed toappreciate the early hours of the day. A man, we found, might livethrough quite a little Iliad of adventure before going to his nineo'clock office.
"How will you possibly get time to put in a garden?" I asked of one ofmy neighbours during this glad period of early spring before I left forthe country. "Time!" he exclaimed. "Why, my dear fellow, I don't have tobe down at the warehouse till eight-thirty."
Later in the summer I saw the wreck of his garden, choked withweeds. "Your garden," I said, "is in poor shape." "Garden!" he saidindignantly. "How on earth can I find time for a garden? Do you realizethat I have to be down at the warehouse at eight-thirty?"
When I look back to our bright beginnings our failure seems hard indeedto understand. It is only when I survey the whole garden movement inmelancholy retrospect that I am able to see some of the reasons for it.
The principal one, I think, is the question of the season. It appearsthat the right time to begin gardening is last year. For many things itis well to begin the year before last. For good results one must begineven sooner. Here, for example, are the directions, as I interpretthem, for growing asparagus. Having secured a suitable piece of ground,preferably a deep friable loam rich in nitrogen, go out three years agoand plough or dig deeply. Remain a year inactive, thinking. Two yearsago pulverize the soil thoroughly. Wait a year. As soon as last yearcomes set out the young shoots. Then spend a quiet winter doing nothing.The asparagus will then be ready to work at _this_ year.
This is t
he rock on which we were wrecked. Few of us were men ofsufficient means to spend several years in quiet thought waiting tobegin gardening. Yet that is, it seems, the only way to begin. Asparagusdemands a preparation of four years. To fit oneself to grow strawberriesrequires three years. Even for such humble things as peas, beans, andlettuce the instructions inevitably read, "plough the soil deeply in thepreceeding autumn." This sets up a dilemma. _Which_ is the preceedingautumn? If a man begins gardening in the spring he is too late for lastautumn and too early for this. On the other hand if he begins in theautumn he is again too late; he has missed this summer's crop. It is,therefore, ridiculous to begin in the autumn and impossible to begin inthe spring.
This was our first difficulty. But the second arose from the questionof the soil itself. All the books and instructions insist that theselection of the soil is the most important part of gardening. No doubtit is. But, if a man has already selected his own backyard before heopens the book, what remedy is there? All the books lay stress on theneed of "a deep, friable loam full of nitrogen." This I have never seen.My own plot of land I found on examination to contain nothing but earth.I could see no trace of nitrogen. I do not deny the existence of loam.There may be such a thing. But I am admitting now in all humility ofmind that I don't know what loam is. Last spring my fellow gardeners andI all talked freely of the desirability of "a loam." My own opinion isthat none of them had any clearer ideas about it than I had. Speakingfrom experience, I should say that the only soils are earth, mud anddirt. There are no others.
But I leave out the soil. In any case we were mostly forced to disregardit. Perhaps a more fruitful source of failure even than the lack of loamwas the attempt to apply calculation and mathematics to gardening. Thus,if one cabbage will grow in one square foot of ground, how many cabbageswill grow in ten square feet of ground? Ten? Not at all. The answer is_one_. You will find as a matter of practical experience that howevermany cabbages you plant in a garden plot there will be only _one_ thatwill really grow. This you will presently come to speak of as _the_cabbage. Beside it all the others (till the caterpillars finally finishtheir existence) will look but poor, lean things. But _the_ cabbage willbe a source of pride and an object of display to visitors; in fact itwould ultimately have grown to be a _real_ cabbage, such as you buy forten cents at any market, were it not that you inevitably cut it and eatit when it is still only half-grown.
This always happens to the one cabbage that is of decent size, and tothe one tomato that shows signs of turning red (it is really a feeblegreen-pink), and to the only melon that might have lived to ripen. Theyget eaten. No one but a practised professional gardener can live andsleep beside a melon three-quarters ripe and a cabbage two-thirds grownwithout going out and tearing it off the stem.
Even at that it is not a bad plan to eat the stuff while you can. Themost peculiar thing about gardening is that all of a sudden everythingis too old to eat. Radishes change over night from delicate young shootsnot large enough to put on the table into huge plants seven feet highwith a root like an Irish shillelagh. If you take your eyes off alettuce bed for a week the lettuces, not ready to eat when you lastlooked at them, have changed into a tall jungle of hollyhocks. Greenpeas are only really green for about two hours. Before that they areyoung peas; after that they are old peas. Cucumbers are the worst caseof all. They change overnight, from delicate little bulbs obviously tooslight and dainty to pick, to old cases of yellow leather filled withseeds.
If I were ever to garden again, a thing which is out of the bounds ofpossibility, I should wait until a certain day and hour when all theplants were ripe, and then go out with a gun and shoot them all dead, sothat they could grow no more.
But calculation, I repeat, is the bane of gardening. I knew, among ourgroup of food producers, a party of young engineers, college men,who took an empty farm north of the city as the scene of their summeroperations. They took their coats off and applied college methods. Theyran out, first, a base line AB, and measured off from it lateralspurs MN, OP, QR, and so on. From these they took side angles with atheodolite so as to get the edges of each of the separate plots oftheir land absolutely correct. I saw them working at it all through oneSaturday afternoon in May. They talked as they did it of the peculiarignorance of the so-called practical farmer. He never--so theyagreed--uses his head. He never--I think I have their phrasecorrect--stops to think. In laying out his ground for use, it neveroccurs to him to try to get the maximum result from a given space. Ifa farmer would only realize that the contents of a circle represent themaximum of space enclosable in a given perimeter, and that a circle ismerely a function of its own radius, what a lot of time he would save.
These young men that I speak of laid out their field engineer-fashionwith little white posts at even distances. They made a blueprint of thewhole thing as they planted it. Every corner of it was charted out. Theyield was calculated to a nicety. They had allowed for the fact thatsome of the stuff might fail to grow by introducing what they called "acoefficient of error." By means of this and by reducing the variation ofautumn prices to a mathematical curve, those men not only knew alreadyin the middle of May the exact yield of their farm to within half abushel (they allowed, they said, a variation of half a bushel per fiftyacres), but they knew beforehand within a few cents the market valuethat they would receive. The figures, as I remember them, were simplyamazing. It seemed incredible that fifty acres could produce so much.Yet there were the plain facts in front of one, calculated out. Thething amounted practically to a revolution in farming. At least it oughtto have. And it would have if those young men had come again to hoetheir field. But it turned out, most unfortunately, that they were busy.To their great regret they were too busy to come. They had been workingunder a free-and-easy arrangement. Each man was to give what time hecould every Saturday. It was left to every man's honour to do what hecould. There was no compulsion. Each man trusted the others to be there.In fact the thing was not only an experiment in food production, it wasalso a new departure in social co-operation. The first Saturday thatthose young men worked there were, so I have been told, seventy-five ofthem driving in white stakes and running lines. The next Saturday therewere fifteen of them planting potatoes. The rest were busy. The weekafter that there was one man hoeing weeds. After that silence fell uponthe deserted garden, broken only by the cry of the chick-a-dee and thechoo-choo feeding on the waving heads of the thistles.
But I have indicated only two or three of the ways of failing at foodproduction. There are ever so many more. What amazes me, in returningto the city, is to find the enormous quantities of produce of all sortsoffered for sale in the markets. It is an odd thing that last spring,by a queer oversight, we never thought, any of us, of this process ofincreasing the supply. If every patriotic man would simply take a largebasket and go to the market every day and buy all that he could carryaway there need be no further fear of a food famine.
And, meantime, my own vegetables are on their way. They are in a soapbox with bars across the top, coming by freight. They weigh forty-sixpounds, including the box. They represent the result of four months'arduous toil in sun, wind, and storm. Yet it is pleasant to think that Ishall be able to feed with them some poor family of refugees during therigour of the winter. Either that or give them to the hens. I certainlywon't eat the rotten things myself.