COLCHESTER.

: Stories To Tell Children

From Seeds and Plants Company, Reading.



Margery could hardly wait to open it. It was filled with little

packages, all with printed labels; and in the packages, of course, were

seeds. It made Margery dance, just to read the names,--nasturtium, giant

helianthus, canariensis, calendula, Canterbury bells: more names than I

can tell you; and other packages, bigger, that said, "Sweet Peas,"

"French beans," "Car ots," "Wallflowers," and such things! Margery could

almost smell the posies, she was so excited. Only, she had seen so

little of flowers that she did not know what all the names meant. She

did not know that a helianthus was a sunflower until her mother told her

so, and she had never seen the dear, blue, bell-shaped flowers that

always grow in old-fashioned gardens, and are called Canterbury bells.

She thought the calendula must be a strange, grand flower, by its name;

but her mother told her it was the gay, sturdy, everydayish little

flower called a marigold. There was a great deal for a little city girl

to be surprised about, and it did seem as if morning was a long way off!



"Did you think you could plant them in the morning?" asked her mother.

"You know, dear, the ground has to be made ready first; it takes a

little time,--it may be several days before you can plant."



That was another surprise. Margery had thought she could begin to sow

the seed right off.



But this was what had happened. Early the next morning, a man came

driving up to the cottage with two strong white horses; in his wagon was

a plough. I suppose you have seen ploughs, but Margery never had, and

she watched with great interest, while the man and her father took the

plough from the cart and harnessed the horses to it. It was a great,

three-cornered piece of sharp steel, with long handles coming up from

it, so that a man could hold it in place. It looked like this:--







"I brought a two-horse plough because it's virgin soil," the man said.

Margery wondered what in the world he meant; it had not been

cultivated, of course, but what had that do with the kind of plough?

"What does he mean, father?" she whispered, when she got a chance. "He

means that this land has not been ploughed before; it will be hard to

turn the soil, and one horse could not pull the plough," said her

father.



It took the man two hours to plough the little strip of land. He drove

the sharp end of the plough into the soil, and held it firmly so, while

the horses drew it along in a straight line. Margery found it

fascinating to watch the long line of dark earth and green grass come

rolling up and turn over, as the knife passed it. She could see that it

took real skill and strength to keep the line even, and to avoid the

stones. Sometimes the plough struck a hidden stone, and then the man was

jerked almost off his feet. But he only laughed, and said, "Tough piece

of land; it will be a lot better next year."



When he had ploughed, the man went back to his cart and unloaded another

farm implement. This one was like a three-cornered platform of wood,

with a long, curved, strong rake under it. It was called a harrow, and

it looked like the diagram on the next page.



The man harnessed the horses to it, and then he stood on the platform

and drove all over the strip of land. It was fun to watch, but perhaps

it was a little hard to do. The man's weight kept the harrow steady,

and let the teeth of the rake scratch and cut the ground up, so that it

did not stay in ridges.



"He scrambles the ground, father!" said Margery.



"It needs 'scrambling,'" laughed her father. "We are going to get more

weeds than we want on this fresh soil, and the more the ground is

broken, the fewer there will be."







After the ploughing and harrowing, the man drove off, and Margery's

father said that he himself would do the rest of the work in the late

afternoons, when he came home from business; they could not afford too

much help, he said, and he had learned to take care of a garden when he

was a boy. So Margery did not see any more done until the next day.



But the next day there was hard work for Margery's father! Every bit of

that ground had to be broken up still more with a spade, and then the

clods which were full of grass-roots had to be taken on a fork and

shaken, till the earth fell out; when the grass was thrown to one side.

That would not have had to be done if the land had been ploughed in the

autumn; the grass would have rotted in the ground, and would have made

food for the plants. Now, Margery's father put the fertiliser on the

top, and then raked it into the earth.



At last, it was time to make the place for the seeds. Margery and her

mother helped. Father tied one end of a cord to a little stake, and

drove the stake in the ground at one end of the garden. Then he took the

cord to the other end of the garden and pulled it tight, tied it to

another stake, and drove that down. That made a straight line. Then he

hoed a trench, a few inches deep, the whole length of the cord, and

scattered fertiliser in it. Pretty soon the whole garden was lined with

little trenches.



"Now for the seed," said father.



Margery ran and brought the seed box. "May I help?" she asked.



"If you watch me sow one row, I think you can do the next," said her

father.



So Margery watched. Her father took a handful of peas, and, stooping,

walked slowly along the line, letting the seed trickle through his

fingers. It was pretty to watch; it made Margery think of a photograph

her teacher had, a photograph of a famous picture called "The Sower."

Perhaps you have seen it.



Putting in the seed was not so easy to do as to watch; sometimes Margery

dropped in too much, and sometimes not enough; but her father was

patient with her, and soon she did better.



They planted peas, beans, spinach, carrots, and parsnips. And Margery's

father made a row of holes, after that, for the tomato plants. He said

those had to be transplanted; they could not be sown from seed.



When the seeds were in the trenches they had to be covered up, and

Margery really helped at that. It is fun to do it. You stand beside the

little trench and walk backward, and as you walk you hoe the loose earth

back over the seeds; the same earth that was hoed up you pull back

again. Then you rake very gently over the surface, with the back of a

rake, to even it all off. Margery liked it, because now the garden began

to look _like_ a garden.



But best of all was the work next day, when her own little particular

garden was begun. Father Brown loved Margery and Margery's mother so

much that he wanted their garden to be perfect, and that meant a great

deal more work. He knew very well that the old grass would begin to come

through again on such soil, and that it would make terribly hard

weeding. He was not going to have any such thing for his two "little

girls," as he called them. So he gave that little garden particular

attention. This is what he did.



After he had thrown out all the turf, he shovelled clean earth on to the

garden,--as much as three solid inches of it; not a bit of grass was in

that. Then it was ready for raking and fertilising, and for the lines.

The little footpaths were marked out by Father Brown's feet; Margery and

her mother laughed well at his actions, for it looked like some kind of

dance. Mr Brown had seen gardeners do it when he was a little boy, and

he did it very nicely: he walked along the sides of the square, with one

foot turned a little out, and the other straight, taking such tiny steps

that his feet touched each other all the time. This tramped out a path

just wide enough for a person to walk.



The wider path was marked with lines and raked.



Margery thought, of course, all the flowers would be put in as the

vegetables were; but she found that it was not so. For some, her father

poked little holes with his finger; for some, he made very shallow

trenches; and some very small seeds were scattered lightly over the top

of the ground.



Margery and her mother had taken so much pains in thinking out the

arrangement of the flowers, that perhaps you will like to hear just how

they designed that garden. At the back were the sweet peas, which would

grow tall, like a screen; on the two sides, for a kind of hedge, were

yellow sunflowers; and along the front edge were the gay nasturtiums.

Margery planned that, so that she could look into the garden from the

front, but have it shut away from the vegetable patch by the tall

flowers on the sides. The two front corners had canariensis in them.

Canariensis is a pretty creeper with golden blossoms, very dainty and

bright. And then, in little square patches all round the garden, were

planted London pride, blue bachelor's buttons, yellow marigolds, tall

larkspur, many-coloured asters, hollyhocks and stocks. All these lovely

flowers used to grow in our grandmothers' gardens, and if you don't know

what they look like, I hope you can find out next summer.



Between the flowers and the middle path went the seeds for that

wonderful salad garden; all the things Mrs Brown had named to Margery

were there. Margery had never seen anything more wonderful than the

little round lettuce-seeds. They were so tiny that it did not seem

possible that green lettuce leaves could come from them. But they surely

would.



Mother and father and Margery were late to supper that evening. But they

were all so happy that it did not matter. The last thing Margery

thought of, as she went to sleep at night, was the dear, smooth little

garden, with its funny footpath, and with the little sticks standing at

the ends of the rows, labelled "lettuce," "beets," "helianthus," and so

on.



"I have a garden! I have a garden!" was Margery's last thought as she

went off to dreamland.