butcher's cart and the grocery wagon. It is not in price alone that
home gardening pays. There is another point: the market gardener has to
grow the things that give the biggest yield. He has to sacrifice
quality to quantity. You do not. One cannot buy Golden Bantam corn, or
Mignonette lettuce, or Gradus peas in most markets. They are top
quality, but they do not fill the market crate enough times to the row
to pay the commercial grower. If you cannot afford to keep a
professional gardener there is only one way to have the best
vegetables--grow your own!

And this brings us to the third, and what may be the most important
reason why you should garden. It is the cheapest, healthiest, keenest
pleasure there is. Give me a sunny garden patch in the golden
springtime, when the trees are picking out their new gowns, in all the
various self-colored delicate grays and greens--strange how beautiful
they are, in the same old unchanging styles, isn't it?--give me seeds
to watch as they find the light, plants to tend as they take hold in
the fine, loose, rich soil, and you may have the other sports. And when
you have grown tired of their monotony, come back in summer to even the
smallest garden, and you will find in it, every day, a new problem to
be solved, a new campaign to be carried out, a new victory to win.

Better food, better health, better living--all these the home garden
offers you in abundance. And the price is only the price of every
worth-while thing--honest, cheerful patient work.

But enough for now of the dream garden. Put down your book. Put on your
old togs, light your pipe--some kind-hearted humanitarian should devise
for women such a kindly and comforting vice as smoking--and let's go
outdoors and look the place over, and pick out the best spot for that