“Let’s do something else, Jimmy, and let Mr. Ames finish the stone-work,” suggested Natalie, quickly. Just then Rachel came out on the back steps of the kitchen porch.
“Mis’ James, Farmeh Ames say foh you-all to drive ole Bob back to his house en’ fetch a load of compos’ what he says is back of his barns. His man knows about it. Den you kin brung along dem leetle plants what is weeded out of his garden and keep ’em down cellar fer to-night.”
Natalie felt elated at this novel suggestion of work, thereby freeing them both from the irksome task of stoning the garden. And Mrs. James laughed as she pictured herself driving the farm-wagon on the county road where an endless stream of automobiles constantly passed.
But she was courageous, and soon the two were gayly chattering, as Bob stumbled and stamped along the macadam road. Above the clatter of loose wheels and rattling boards in the floor of the old wagon, the merry laughter of Natalie could be heard by the autoists, as they passed the “turn-out” from Green Hill Farm.
Having reached the Ames’s farm and found the handy-man who would load up the barnyard compost in the wagon for them, Natalie asked him many questions that had been interesting her.
CHAPTER VII—NATALIE LEARNS SEVERAL SECRETS
Natalie made good use of her eyes while Farmer Ames’s man gave her the vegetable slips, and when she got back home the first question she asked Mr. Ames was: “Why can’t I buy a few of your asparagus slips? I love asparagus and you have a fine bed of it.”
“I’d give yer some slips, and welcome, but it don’t grow that way,” replied he. “First you’ve got to hev jest the right quality of sand and loam mixed in kerrect proportions, and then yer seed it down. The fust season of asparagrass it ain’t no good fer cuttin’; the secunt year it turns out a few baby stalks, but the third year it comes along with a fine crop—ef you’ve taken good care of it through the winter cold, and shaded the young plants from summer’s sun-heat the fust two years.”
“Oh, I never dreamed there was so much trouble to just raising asparagus!” exclaimed Natalie. “How long does it take in the spring, Mr. Ames, before the plant produces the ripe vegetable?”
Mr. Ames turned and stared at Natalie to see if she was joking, but finding she was really in earnest, he laughingly replied: “Asparagrass doesn’t ripen like termaters er beans,—when the young stalk shoots up from the sile, yer cut it off. It is the tip that is best, fer that holds the heart of the plant. Ef you let it keep on growin’ it will shoot up into a high plant with the seed in its cup. But we cut it before it grows up.”