Page:St. Nicholas (serial) (IA stnicholasserial402dodg).pdf/464

910 “Aha, that ’s just the point!” said the big sage. “They have been overfed till their digestions are so troublesome that they can’t do any fine work, like making blossoms, to save their lives. Look at this Countess Spencer; why, it ought to be covered with flowers as big as little orchids; but there are barely a score here, and they ‘re small at that.”

“Well, how ’s a fellow to know about everything, Uncle Ned?” demanded the small sage, disconsolately, Whereat Uncle Ned laughed, and said “How, indeed!” most sympathetically. For he remembered all the perplexing things of his own big garden at home, and haw many times he had asked himself that very same question during the years he had been making it.

When we consider how very important eating is to boys and girls and men and women and dogs and cats and horses, and every living thing, we can begin to realize how very important it is to plants; and thus we can perhaps understand how necessary it is for us, who are housekeepers and caterers lo them, as well as special policemen, really to know what to include in their diet list. Think how ill we should be if we had nothing given us to eat but cake and candy; no bread and butter, no nice salads, no fruits, but just rich chocolate cake for breakfast, and richer fig-cake for luncheon, and then some marshmallows for tea, perhaps, with a bite of sponge-cake before we went to bed! Or suppose we had to live on lemons, rhubarb, and vinegar How dreadful! Yet this is exactly the way we sometimes feed our plants—and then wonder why they do not thrive.

The first thing to be learned about plant catering is this: all plants do not eat the same quantities of all kinds of food. Most fertilizers—which is the name we have given to plant-foods generally, just as we call our own foods “groceries” have the three essentials which are necessary to keep plants alive. But some contain more of one and less of the others, while some plants need less of one, perhaps, and more of the others. So just giving all plants generally “plenty of fertilizer” is not at all what the skilled gardener or the thoughtful gardener does. He watches to see what they need, and then he supplies them with that particular thing,

The Spencer hybrid sweet-peas, for instance, need a great deal of nitrogen, as do all the members of the pea family; but too much of this, which makes leaves and branches grow at a perfectly tremendous rate, turns the plant all into vine, and does not help it the least bit in the world in the making of flowers.

We cannot go over the list of all the plants which may be growing in your garden, and learn especially what each one needs the most; that might be a pretty big task, but we can learn just what each of the most important plant-foods does for the plant, after we are sure that the one great fact of plants not all eating alike, which I have just mentioned, is understood, And then we should be able to tell pretty accurately what any particular plant lacks, if it does lack something, by the symptoms which it displays.

These three principal things that plants live upon—that are to them what meat and vegetables and sugar are to humans—are nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash; and in the order in which they are here named they encourage and stimnlate, respectively, top growth—that is, leaf and branch and green generally—flowers, and woody growth and fruit. And they are furnished to the plant, the first by nitrate of soda, as it comes in the powder from the drug-store, or by cotton-seed meal, or by what is called green fertilizing—which I shall tell you about presently—and by stable manure; the second by ground bone, bone-ash, bone meal, and all the “bone” products advertised for sale by dealers in fertilizer, also by the rock from South Carolina’s phosphate beds, which is called “floats”; and the third by sulphate of potash, or the German stuff called “Kainite,” or unleached hardwood ashes,

All this is a good deal to remember, is n’t it? So I am going to put it in the form of a little table that will tell you, at a glance, the whole story; and will tell you, also, how much of each of these three things should be used when a combination that is a “complete” fertilizer is desired.

Now if the sweet-peas are lacking in blossom, as with the Spencer hybrids in the garden we have just been reading about, and they have “run all to vine,” as the saying goes, it is perfectly evident that they do not need any more of the things that have nitrogen in them; but that one of the things that contain phosphoric acid is what