"I will say no more" is
the most effective thing you can close up with.

I am not an alarmist. I hope I am as cool as anybody this hot summer.
But I am quite ready to say to Polly, or any other woman, "You can have
the ballot; only leave me the vegetables, or, what is more important,
the consciousness of power in vegetables." I see how it is. Woman is now
supreme in the house. She already stretches out her hand to grasp the
garden. She will gradually control everything. Woman is one of the
ablest and most cunning creatures who have ever mingled in human
affairs. I understand those women who say they don't want the ballot.
They purpose to hold the real power while we go through the mockery of
making laws. They want the power without the responsibility. (Suppose my
squash had not come up, or my beans--as they threatened at one time--had
gone the wrong way: where would I have been?) We are to be held to
all the responsibilities. Woman takes the lead in all the departments,
leaving us politics only. And what is politics? Let me raise the
vegetables of a nation, says Polly, and I care not who makes its
politics. Here I sat at the table, armed with the ballot, but really
powerless among my own vegetables. While we are being amused by the
ballot, woman is quietly taking things into her own hands.

ELEVENTH WEEK

Perhaps, after all, it is not what you get out of a garden, but what you
put into it, that is the most remunerative. What is a man? A question
frequently asked, and never, so far as I know, satisfactorily answered.
He commonly spends his seventy years, if so many are given him, in
getting ready to enjoy himself. How many hours, how many minutes, does
one get of that pure content which is happiness? I do not mean laziness,
which is always discontent; but that serene enjoyment, in which all the
natural senses have easy play, and the unnatural ones have a holiday.
There is probably nothing that has such a tranquilizing effect, and
leads into such content as gardening. By gardening, I do not mean that
insane desire to raise vegetables which some have; but the philosophical
occupation of contact with the earth, and companionship with gently
growing things and patient processes; that exercise which soothes the
spirit, and develops the deltoid muscles.

In half an hour I can hoe myself right away from this world, as we
commonly see it, into a large place, where there are no obstacles. What
an occupation it is for t