Instructions in gardening for ladies

by Mrs. Loudon

All the necessary implements for digging being provided, the next thing to be considered is the easiest manner of performing the operation. The usual way is for the gardener to thrust his spade perpendicularly into the ground, and then using the handle as a lever, to draw it back so as to raise the whole mass of earth in front of the spade at once. This requires great strength; but by inserting the spade in a slanting direction, and throwing the body slightly forward at the same time, the mass of earth to be raised will not only be much less, but the body of the operator will be in a much more convenient position for raising and turning it; which may thus be done with perfect ease.

The time for digging should always be chosen, if possible, when the ground is tolerably dry; not only on account of the danger of taking cold by standing on the damp earth, but because the soil, when damp, adheres to the spade, and is much more difficult to work (as the gardeners call it,) than when it is dry. The ground in fields, &c. becomes very hard in dry weather; but this is never the case in a garden, the soil of which is well pulverized by the constant digging, forking, hoeing and raking it must undergo, to keep the garden tolerably neat. Every lady should be careful, when she has finished digging, to have her spade dipped in water, and then wiped dry; after which it should be hung up in some warm dry shed, or harness room, to keep it free from rust; as nothing lessens the labour of digging more than having a perfectly smooth and polished spade. Should the earth adhere to the spade while digging, dipping the blade in water occasionally, will be found to facilitate the operation.

The purposes for which digging is applied in gardening are: simple digging for loosening the soil in order to prepare it for a crop; pointing; burying manure; exposing the soil to the action of the weather; trenching; ridging; forming pits for planting trees and shrubs, or for filling with choice soil for sowing seeds; and taking up plants when they are to be removed.

In simple digging, as well as in most of the other kinds, it is customary to divide the bed to be dug, by a garden-line, into two parts: a trench, or furrow as it is called, is then opened across one of these divisions or half of the bed, the earth out of which is thrown up into a heap. The digging then commences by turning over a breadth of soil into the furrow thus made, and thus forming a new furrow to be filled up by the soil turned over from the breadth beyond it; and this is continued till the operator reaches the end of the first division, where the furrow is to be filled with the earth taken from the first furrow of the second division; after which the digging proceeds regularly as before, till the operator reaches the last furrow, which is filled with the ridge of earth thrown up when the first furrow was made. As few ladies are strong enough to throw the earth from the heap where it was laid from the first furrow to fill the last, the best way is to put it into a small wheel-barrow, which may be wheeled to the place required, and filled and emptied as often as may be found convenient; or the ground may be divided into narrower strips. It must also be observed, that as a spitful of earth taken up obliquely will be seldom found enough to loosen the soil to a proper depth, a second or even a third should be taken from the same place before the operator advances any further along the line. Or the whole of each furrow may first be made shallow, and then deepened by successive diggings before proceeding to the next furrow.

It is obvious that the great art in this kind of digging is to keep the furrows straight, and not to take up more earth in one place than in another, so that the surface of the ground, when finished, may be perfectly even. To keep the furrows straight, the first ought to be worked out with the rod and line, and every succeeding line should be frequently and carefully examined. It is more difficult to keep these lines straight than can be at first sight imagined; and in proportion as the furrow is allowed to become crooked it will become narrower, and be in danger of being choked up; or, if kept as wide as before, the surface of the ground will be rendered uneven, and the last furrow left without earth enough to fill it up. In digging each furrow also, care must be taken to carry it quite up to the line of demarcation; as, otherwise, what the gardeners call a baulk or piece of firm land would be left there, and, of course, the bed would neither look well, nor would the object for which it was dug be fully attained. Great care must also be taken to keep the surface of the bed even, and this it is extremely difficult for a novice to do. It is, indeed, very provoking, after watching the ease with which a gardener digs a bed, and looking at the perfectly smooth and even surface that he leaves, to find how very hard it is to imitate him; and yet it is essentially necessary to be done, for if there are any irregularities in the surface, the hollow places will collect the moisture, and the plants in them will grow vigorously, while those in the raised places will be speedily dried by the sun and wind, and will look poor and withered. Practice is certainly required to render digging easy, but, as the principal points of keeping the furrows straight and the surface even, depend on skill more than strength, the art of digging well may be acquired by any one who thinks it worth while to take the trouble. Very little strength will, indeed, be necessary, if the rule of thrusting in the spade obliquely, and aiding it by the momentum of the body be always attended to.

Pointing, as it is called by gardeners, is in fact shallow digging, and it consists in merely turning over the ground to the depth of two or three inches. In spring, or in the beginning of summer, when the sun has only warmed the soil to the depth of a few inches, and when the seeds to be sown (as of annual flowers for example) are wanted to germinate as quickly as possible, pointing is preferable to digging; because the latter operation would bury the warm soil, and bring that up to the surface which is still as cold as in winter. Pointing is also used in stirring the ground among trees and other plants, in order that the spade may not go so deeply into the ground as to injure their roots.

Burying manure.—There are two ways of digging the ground for the purpose of burying manure: according to the first method, the manure is spread evenly over the whole bed, and then the gardener proceeds to dig as though the manure were in fact a portion of the surface of the soil; and according to the second method, the manure having been first brought to the spot and thrown into a heap, is deposited, a small portion at a time, at the bottom of each furrow as it is formed, and the earth from the next furrow thrown over it. In both cases, the manure should be buried as speedily as possible; as if left long exposed in small quantities to the air in hot dry weather, it loses a great part of its nutritious qualities by evaporation.

Digging for the purpose of exposing the soil to the action of the weather, trenching, and ridging on a large scale, are operations too laborious to be performed by any one but a gardener’s labourer. To be done well, the earth in all these cases should be mixed in large spitfuls at a time, and turned over without breaking, on which account they are best performed in moist weather, when the earth is in an adhesive state. Ridging on a small scale may be useful in a flower garden, when the soil is much infested with insects, or where there are many weeds. It is performed by opening a trench, and throwing up the earth out of it in the form of a ridge; and then opening another trench, and forming another ridge in the same manner. The whole garden is thus thrown into a series of ridges and trenches, which should be suffered to remain all the winter, and be levelled in spring. It is obvious that this mode of ameliorating the soil can only be practised where the garden is not likely to be visited during winter, as it destroys all beauty, and has a peculiarly desolate and forlorn appearance. It is indeed a remedy only to be resorted to in extreme cases, but fortunately there are very few flower gardens in which the soil is in so bad a state as to require it.

The other kinds of digging, are to form pits for receiving plants, or for filling with choice soil, and to remove plants. In the first case, a hole of sufficient size to receive the plant is dug, and the earth thrown up beside it, to be filled in round the roots of the plant; and in the second case, the common garden earth is thrown out of a pit a foot or eighteen inches deep, and about the same in diameter, and its place supplied by peat, or whatever other kind of earth may be required. In removing a young tree or shrub, the ground is generally first dug out on one side, so as to form a small trench, and then the spade is driven perpendicularly into the ground, below the depth to which the roots descend, and the whole mass is raised like a spade full of earth. Small plants are raised by the spade at once without making any trench; and large trees require all the skill of a professed gardener.

Forking.—A broad-pronged garden fork may be defined as an implement consisting of a number of small sharply pointed spades, united by a shoulder or hilt, to which is fixed the handle; and forking differs from digging principally in its being used merely to stir the soil, and not to turn it over. In shrubberies, and among perennial herbaceous plants, which are not to be taken and replanted, forking is very useful; as it loosens the hard dry surface of the soil, and admits the warm air and rain to the roots of the plants. This is very necessary, as the earth is a bad conductor of heat; and where the surface of the soil is become so hard as to exclude the air from the roots of the plants, the ground in which they grow will be nearly as cold in summer as in winter. Besides, when the surface of the ground is hard, the rain instead of soaking gradually into it, runs off, or evaporates, without being of any service to the roots. The operation of forking consists merely in thrusting the fork a little way into the ground by the application of the foot to the hilt, and then raising the ground by pulling back the handle as in digging, so as to loosen the earth without raising it. The ground may thus be roughly pulverized to a considerable depth, without dividing the roots of the plants; which would have been inevitable if the operator had used a spade.