necessity.

This advice is especially for those who are now so rapidly taking up old
farmsteads, bringing light again to the eyes of the window-panes that
have looked out on the world of nature so long that they were growing
dim from human neglect. In these places, where land is reckoned by the
acre, not by the foot, there is no excuse for the lack of seed beds for
both hardy and annual flowers (though these latter belong to another
record), in addition to space for cuttings of shrubs, hardy roses, and
other woody things that may be thus rooted.

If there is a bit of land that has been used for a vegetable garden and
is not wholly worn out, so much the better. The best seed bed I have
ever seen belongs to Jane Crandon at the Jenks-Smith place on the
Bluffs. It was an old asparagus bed belonging to the farm, thoroughly
well drained and fertilized, but the original crop had grown thin and
spindling from being neglected and allowed to drop its seed.

In the birth of this bed the wind and sun, as in all happy gardens, had
been duly consulted, and the wind promised to keep well behind a thick
wall of hemlocks that bounded it on the north and east whenever he was
in a cruel mood. The sun, casting his rays about to get the points of
compass, promised that he would fix his eye upon the bed as soon as he
had bathed his face in mist on rising and turned the corner of the
house, and then, after watching it until past noon, turn his back, so no
wonder that the bed throve.

Any well-located bit of fairly good ground can be made into a hardy seed
bed, provided only that it is not where frozen water covers it in
winter, or in the way of the wind, coming through a cut or sweeping