early summer. If the
surface soil is lumpy or full of small stones that escape fine raking,
it must be shovelled through a sand-screen, as it is impossible for the
most ambitious seed to grow if its first attempt is met by the pressure
of what would be the equivalent of a hundred-ton boulder to a man.

It is to details such as these that success or failure in seed raising
is due, and when people say, "I prefer to buy plants; I am very unlucky
with seeds," I smile to myself, and the picture of something I once
observed done by one of the so-called gardeners of my early married days
flits before me.

The man scraped a groove half an inch deep in hard-baked soil, with a
pointed stick, scattered therein the dustlike seeds of the dwarf blue
lobelia as thickly as if he had been sprinkling sugar on some very sour
article, then proceeded to trample them into the earth with all the
force of very heavy feet. Of course the seeds thus treated found
themselves sealed in a cement vault, somewhat after the manner of
treating victims of the Inquisition, the trickle of moisture that could
possibly reach them from a careless watering only serving to prolong
their death from suffocation.

The woman gardener, I believe, is never so stupid as this; rather is she
tempted to kill by kindness in overfertilizing and overwatering, but too
lavish of seed in the sowing she certainly is, and I speak from the
conviction born of my own experience.

When the earth is all ready for the planting, and the sweet, moist
odour rises when you open the seed papers with fingers almost trembling
with eagerness, it seems second nature to be lavish. If a few seeds will
produce a few plants, why not the more the merrier? If they come up too
thick, they can be thinned out, you argue, and thick sowing is being on
the safe side. But is it? Quite the contrary. When the seedlings appear,
you delay, waiting for them to gain a good start before jarring their
roots by thinning. All of a sudden they make such strides that when you
begin, you are appalled by the task, and after a while cease pulling the
individual plants, but recklessly attack whole "chunks" at once, or else
give up in a despair that results in a row of anaemic, drawn-out
starvelings that are certainly not to be called a success. After having
tried and duly weighed the labour connected with both methods, I find it
best to sow thinly and to rely on filling gaps by taking a plant here
and there from a cr