the bed and place your line at this point and make a furrow as before.
Repeat the process for a third furrow. You should now have left a space
of eighteen inches between your last furrow and the end of the bed. Into
these three furrows place the beans, spacing them.

Your seeds are now all in. At this juncture take your rake and cover the
seeds, leaving the whole bed level and smooth.

There is nothing more to be done just at present except to leave these
seeds to the forces of nature, to the darkness and the moisture and the
warmth of their earthy bed. They are put to bed not that they may sleep,
but in order to wake them up. Soon the delicate shoots will begin to
appear above the ground, and with them will also appear the shoots of
many weeds whose seeds were in the soil. These weeds constitute a call
to your next operation which is

Cultivation

Declare war on the weeds. Use your hand weeder between the rows of
smaller vegetables and let not a weed escape. If they are in the rows so
near to the seedlings that you cannot use the weeder without danger to
the delicate little plants that you are attending, then employ your
fingers.

For a time you may use the hoe or rake between the rows of beans, but
even here near the paths themselves the weeder or hands should be
preferred.

There is one caution that old gardeners give which is not to work among
beans when they are wet with dew or rain for fear of "rust." Wait till
the sun has dried the foliage.

* * * * *

Frequent and thorough cultivation not only destroys the weeds, thus
giving your vegetables a better chance and giving your garden a tidy,
well-kept appearance, but it keeps the soil loose and forms a sort of
mulch whereby the moisture is conserved. The dryer the season the
greater the need of cultivation.

* * * * *

It may seem to you that you are obliged to wait long and spend a good
deal of labor without results, but when you have for the breakfast table
some cool, crisp radishes and for dinner a head of fresh lettuce, and
later a dish of sweet, luscious beets or mess of string beans, you will
feel well repaid.

Let us now turn our attention to the other bed, in which you are to grow
flowers. This may be treated as a sort of background for the vegetable
bed. To do this let the rows of plants run the other way. That is to
say, lengthwise of the bed instead of across. It is assumed that