How and What to Grow in a Kitchen Garden of One Acre (10th Ed)/Laying out the Garden
LAYING OUT THE GARDEN.
It is most convenient to have the garden as nearly square as possible, which in our garden of one acre will be 208 x 208 feet. This makes the length of the rows a very good measure of the quantity to be grown, and affords as many rows to the ground as can be profitably worked, for it is desirable that the rows should be as nearly east and west as possible, and they should be the long way of the plot (if not a square), as it will result in great saving of time in planting and cultivating. Moving the line and drawing the cultivators out of one row and turning into the next, takes nearly as much time as the working of the short row.
In plowing, a good, wide headland should be left at each end of the garden; it should be wide enough to allow the horse and cultivator to come clear out from between the rows and to turn into the next row, without damaging the plants at the ends of the rows by trampling and dragging the cultivator over them.
In winter, while there is plenty of time before the spring opens, the summer campaign should be planned—what vegetables are to be raised and what quantity of each will be needed, in what part of the garden it will be best to plant each variety so that the pollen from different members of the same family, such as cucumbers and cantaloupes, will not mix and spoil each other’s fine flavor. If the soil is of different quality in different parts of the garden, it should be planned so that the heavy and the lighter portions shall be occupied by such crops as will succeed best in the respective soils.
Ease of cultivation and the rotation or succession of crops should also be considered. The small-growing plants which require hand hoeing should be together, and likewise those which are to be worked with the horse cultivator. Where the ground is to bear two crops—one planted after the other has matured and been taken off—it will be of advantage to have such crops together, thus making larger plots for the replowing and a consequent saving of time and work.
Beside these conditions in laying out a new garden, when it comes to the second or succeeding seasons, the crop or crops raised in the plot the year before must be taken into account. The situation of the crop of each particular vegetable should be moved to another part, as each draws certain proportions of the food elements from the soil, and those of a different character should occupy the ground in rotation, that the soil may be kept in the richest state. Thus the quality or size of the crop will not be lessened by being planted in a situation that it has depleted, to some extent, of its own particular food the year before. Reference should also be had to the kind of food which the plant requires, as in the case of strawberries and potatoes, which should not succeed each other without special manures, as they both exhaust, to a great extent, the potash in the soil, so that the soil, haying borne a heavy crop of one, would of necessity make but a poor return of the other if planted in direct succession. If this cannot be overcome by a change of location, the gardener will know that the proper food elements have been depleted by the previous crop, and must try to supply them with special manure or commercial fertilizers.
It is of great importance to rapid work and good gardening that all this should be arranged and settled in the gardener’s mind, or better, plotted out on paper, before the first plowing is done in the spring. The plan being kept would be valuable in laying out the garden the succeeding year, as it would show just where each vegetable had been grown and where the different kinds of manure had been applied. If, in addition, the success of the various crops and notes of their growth were marked upon it, it would form a most valuable text-book for the study of improved gardening, each garden being an experimental station and each gardener a student in pursuit of knowledge and advancement in his work, feeding at the same time both physical and intellectual needs.