our cherished baccy pouch.

Fred says we ought to have a wheel-barrow; Hank swears by a mulching
iron; Bill is all for cold frames. All three say that hellebore is the
best thing for sucking insects. We echo the expletive, with a different
application.

You see, we have no instinct for gardening. Some fellows, like Bill
Stites, have a divinely implanted zest for the propagation of chard and
rhubarb and self-blanching celery and kohl-rabi; they are kohl-rabid, we
might say. They know, just what to do when they see a weed; they can
assassinate a weevil by just looking at it. But weevils and cabbage
worms are unterrified by us. We can't tell a weed from a young onion. We
never mulched anything in our life; we wouldn't know how to begin.

But the deuce of it is, public opinion says that we must raise a garden.
It is no use to hire a man to do it for us. However badly we may do it,
patriotism demands that we monkey around with a garden of our own. We
may get bitten by a snapping bean or routed by a rutabaga or infected by
a parsnip. But with Bill and those fellows at our heels we have just got
to face it. Hellebore!

What we want to know is, How do you ever find out all these things about
vegetables? We bought an ounce of tomato seeds in desperation, and now
Fred says "one ounce of tomato seeds will produce 3,000 plants. You
should have bought two dozen plants instead of the seed." How does he
know those things? Hank says beans are very delicate and must not be
handled while they are wet or they may get rusty. Again we ask, how does
he know? Where do they learn these matters? Bill says that stones draw
out the moisture from the soil and every stone in the garden should be