food; and if this is important
in growing plants in the field or flower garden, where each vegetable or
flower has from one to several cubic feet of earth in which to grow, how
imperative it is to have rich soil in a pot or plant box where each
plant may have but a few cubic inches!

But the trouble is not so much in knowing that plants should be given
rich soil, as to know how to furnish it. I well remember my first
attempt at making soil rich and thinking how I would surprise my
grandmother, who worked about her plants in pots every day of her life,
and still did not have them as big as they grew in the flower garden. I
had seen the hired man put fertilizer on the garden. That was the
secret! So I got a wooden box about two-thirds full of mellow garden
earth, and filled most of the remaining space with fertilizer, well
mixed into the soil, as I had seen him fix it. I remember that my
anxiety was not that I get too much fertilizer in the soil, but that I
would take so much out of the bag that it would be missed. Great indeed
was my chagrin and disappointment, twelve hours after carefully setting
out and watering my would-be prize plants, to notice that they had
perceptibly turned yellow and wilted. And I certainly had made the soil
rich.

So the problem is by no means as simple as might at first be supposed.
Not only must sufficient plant food be added to the soil but it must be
in certain forms, and neither too much nor too little may be given if
the best results are to be attained.

Now it is a fact established beyond all dispute that not only food, but
air and water, as well, must be supplied to the roots of growing plants;
and this being the case, the _mechanical_ condition of the soil in which
the plant is to grow has a great deal to do with its success or failure.
It must be what is termed a porous and friable soil--that is, one so
light and open that water will drain through it without making it a
compact, muddy mass. One of the things I noticed about my special
fertilizer soil, mentioned above, was that it settled, after being
watered, into a solid mass from which water would not drain and into
which air could not penetrate.

It is next to impossible to find a soil just right for house plants, so,
as a general thing the only way to get a good soil is to mix it
yourself. For this purpose several ingredients are used. If you live in
a village or suburb, where the following may be procured, your problem
is no