GETTING YOUR VEGETABLES FRESH.
THE chief charm of having a garden of your own is the fresh state of the
vegetables which daily garnish your table. Any one who has always depended
upon a store for his supply does not have the faintest conception of the
superior flavor, tone, and elasticity of vegetables gathered fresh every
morning from your own garden. Aside from this benefit, gardening is the most
health-giving occupation known to man; unless we except that of a physician,
which we don't. There is a man who lives on the other side of our street,
who has a garden, and has fresh vegetables every day, our folks say. We don't
know any thing about that; but we do know he has a garden, because we see
him out in it every morning, in shirt-sleeves and slippers, picking cucumber
and squash bugs. We know when he gets hold of one, by the way
he shuts up
his mouth and fingers. Sometimes he doesn't catch the one he is after, and
sometimes he makes a half-dozen passes at one bug. Every time he makes one
of those passes he says something. The first remark is not very plainly heard,
but the next is quite so; and the observation that follows after the sixth
unfortunate pass appears to go completely through our head. He jumps around
this way for about an hour, and, having got his blood up to fever-heat, goes
in and drinks a cup of boiling coffee, and then goes to business. At noon
he goes out there to kill a couple more bugs, but doesn't do it. He finds
two hens from the next house in the cucumber-patch. They have scratched down
to the cool earth, and thrown the parched soil of two cucumber-hills over
their backs, and, with one eye closed in a speculative way, are thinking
of the intense heat and the short grass-crop. When they see him, and the
preparations of welcome he has hastily got together, they get up and leave.
The first thing he throws at them knocks a limb from a choice pear-tree;
and the next thing, which is generally a pail, goes through a glass cover
to some choice flower-seeds, and loses its bail. He then goes into the house
and gets some more boiling coffee, and says the man next door is—(something
we never put in print)—and goes to business again. At night he comes home
and kills bugs until supper-time, and then
goes in with his fingers smelling
as if he had shaken hands with twelve hundred bed-bugs. He keeps his boy
home from school to watch the garden, and guard it against the encroachment
of straying cattle. The boy gets several other boys to come over and help
him. They take a half-dozen sheets out of the wash, and put up a circus in
the back part of the yard; and some vicious boy who hasn't pins enough to
get in leaves the front-gate open; and, when the circus is in the midst of
its glory, the cry of "A cow in the garden!" breaks up the performance, and
sends both artists and audience in pursuit of the beast. When our neighbor
comes home that night to gather vegetables fresh from the garden, and smash
bugs with his finger and thumb, and goes out and looks at the destruction,
it is altogether likely the first thing he thinks of is the danger in eating
store-vegetables which have been picked some days before, and allowed to
swelter and wither in noxious barrels, and how much better it is to have
every thing fresh from the garden. But we are not certain; neither is the
proprietor of the circus.
