"I notice that you speak of your tomato in the singular. Don't the other members of the family like tomatoes?"
"Aw, see here," he protested with offended dignity, "I'm not running a farm. I'm gardening on a town lot."
"Quite so. How is your squash doing?" I began to use the singular also.
"Say!" he exclaimed in a confidential tone, seeing that I understood something of his difficulties, "I admit that that squash was a mistake. The vine has already covered the carrot bed and the gravel walk, and is trespassing on my neighbour's lot at the rate of one yard of vine and three big leaves a day. It is making my garden look like a tropical jungle, and there isn't a sign of a squash on it yet, though there have been plenty of blossoms."
"How much space have you under garden?" I asked abruptly.
"Well," he squirmed, "we have a forty-foot frontage, and the garden runs back about thirty feet, but I haven't got it all under vegetables. We have a fine peach tree and a lilac bush, and my wife has a couple of flower beds in one corner, but I have all I can really attend to. It is intensive gardening all right, but we have been having something from it every day since the first radishes and lettuce came in."
Further conversation brought out the fact that he has four stalks of corn in his garden, and that some day soon he is going to have green corn for dinner. His corn is doing fine, by the way, and doesn't seem to be affected by the heat and drought.
Another city farmer had been having some trouble and wanted to know if I could tell him what it was. His vegetables have been acting freakishly. They grew too fast at first, put on too much top, turned yellow, and then seemed to burn out in spite of watering and much cultivation. When I found out how much fertiliser he had surprised his eight-by-twelve patch of ground with I diagnosed the case as one of water-brash or some similar form of soil indigestion. I advised him to put his garden on a spoon diet till it got back to normal. At the present time it is evidently so strong that it is heaving the roots out of the ground. Another man complained that his troubles were due to a city ordinance that forbade the use of water during the recent hot spell.
"If I had been at home," he explained, "things would have been different. But I went away with my family for a two-weeks' holiday and left the garden to the care of a man who does odd jobs around the neighbourhood. I told him above all things to water it regularly, but as soon as he heard that the city forbade the use of water in that way he shut right off instead of finding some way of doing it at night when no one was looking. It's a corker how careful some people are about the law when it lets them get out of doing work."
But in spite of these occasional failures the crop reports for Toronto are very good. Cucumbers seem to be thriving especially well in captivity, and carrots that are kept in solitary confinement are doing wonderfully. If reciprocity is passed and the yield of canned vegetables is normal Toronto will pull through the winter all right.