“I don’t know, but I’ve read the name somewhere. Don’t interrupt me.”
“And fennel—that will come in handy for fish—and leeks. In that piece of waste ground beyond the barn I think we ought to plant asparagus, because, after all, there is no need to dispense with luxuries if you can grow them for nothing, is there?
“And how would it be to plant maize all down that bed where you had the Shirley poppies? I should think the same aspect would suit the two, and some green corn would be very nice. I suppose, if you plant it now, it will be about right in January or February, wouldn’t it? Or you could sell it. It’s twopence halfpenny or threepence a cob at the Stores. So if you had, say, fifty plants, and if each produced—how many do they produce on a plant? . . . Oh, well, if you don’t know, let’s be on the safe side and say one each—that would be a clear profit of—well, at threepence each—let’s see, fifty pence is four and twopence, and three times would be—twelve and sixpence—say twelve shillings, allowing sixpence for seed. So that would be well worth trying, in case the moratorium never ends. Then there would have to be cabbages and suchlike. How about digging up the orchard, and——”
“Oh, yes,” said Virginia scornfully (she had picked up the paper and read to the end of the aforementioned article, which had proved very enlightening). “And I suppose you expect it all to grow under a couple of feet of snow. Let me tell you that it is now too late to plant anything but onions! He, she, or it, who wrote this article, says so.”
I myself had been going to tell her, when I could get a word in, that it was too late for most of the things she had named.
But Ursula, who had never done any vegetable gardening, was still sceptical. That was why I suggested that we should consult the obliging manager at Carter’s, in Queen Victoria Street, as we often did over our gardening woes.
Just ahead of us in the shop, when we got there, was an elderly gentleman who wanted some grass seed; he asked if they would tell him how to start a lawn next spring.
It was in the middle of the day—a very busy time for a shop of this kind, when city men are on their way to or from lunch, and seize a few extra minutes to buy their seeds. The shop was full—it looked as though every scrap of land within the twelve-mile radius was going to be put under cultivation—and the assistants had all their work to serve everyone as quickly as they wanted to be served.
The Elderly Gentleman was apparently the only one who was not in a hurry; so he asked the most minute questions, and the manager gave him copious directions, from preparing the ground at the start, right up to marking it off for tennis, when it was in its prime (though, judging by the small packet of seed the E. G. had bought, the lawn would never support a tennis-net).
Then by the time the shop was quite packed, and when everything that was possible appeared to have been said about planting and maintaining a lawn—including keeping it free from moss, the best way to trim the edges, the law with regard to trespassing fowls, and the careful tying of black cotton over the newly-planted seeds to keep off the birds—the E. G. asked what he should do when daisies came up? The manager said patiently that his firm’s grass seeds didn’t produce daisies; but as the E. G. seemed to worry about daisies, he was told how to get rid of daisies.