“Well, that is a matter of chice. Some likes to seed their radishes fust, an’ some get their lettuce in fust. Now I does it this way: lettuce grows so mighty fast that I figgers I lose time ef I put it down fust and let the other vegetables wait. So I drops in my beets, radishes, beans, peas, and sech like, an’ last of all I gets in the lettuce seed. I gen’ally uses my early plants from the hot-bed fer the fust crop in my truck-garden. I got some little beet plants, and a handful of radish plants what was weeded out of the over-crowded beds, that you may as well use now, and seed down the others you want. My man is going over all the beds to-day, and I will hev him save what you kin use in your garden.”
“Oh, how good you are! I never knew strangers in the country would act like your own family!” exclaimed Natalie. “In the city everyone thinks of getting the most out of you for what they have, that you might need.”
Both the adults laughed at this precocious denunciation of city dealers. Old Bob now began to plod along the edge of the garden-space with his master behind guiding the plough. Natalie walked beside the farmer and watched eagerly as the soil curled over and over when the blade of the plough cut it through and pushed it upwards.
Farmer Ames was feeling quite at home, now that he was working the ground, and he began to converse freely with his young companion.
“Yeh know, don’cha, thet the man what lived here fer ten years, er more, was what we call a gentleman farmer. He went at things after the rules given in some books from the Agricultural Department from Washerton, D. C. He even hed a feller come out from thar and make a test of the sile. The upshot of it all was, he got a pile of stuff from Noo York—powders, fertilizers, and such, an’ doctored the hull farm until we gaped at him.
“But, we all hed to confess that he raised the finest pertaters, and corn, and other truck of anyone fer many a mile around. I allus did say I’d foller his example, but somehow, thar’s so much work waitin’ to be done on a farm, that one never gits time to sit down to writin’. So I postponed it every year.”
“Why, this is awfully interesting, Mr. Ames. I never knew who the tenant was, but he must have had a good sensible education on how to run a farm, or he wouldn’t have known about these fertilizers.”
“Yeh, we-all ust to grin at him for fuddling about on the sile before he’d seed anythin’—but golly! he got crops like-as-how we never saw raised before.”
“I could try the same methods,” said Natalie musingly.
“He worked over the sile every year, and never planted the same crops in the same places. He called it a sort of rotary process, and he tol’ me my crops would double ef I did it.”