GARDEN CULTURE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 August 1943, Page 3

GARDEN CULTURE

AND HEALTHY LIVING. USEFUL AND INFORMATIVE HANDBOOK. An informative though brief survey of related and interdependent problems of plant and animal nutrition,.and particularly of the production and food value of vegetables for human consumption, is made by Mr J. W. Matthews, F.L.S., in a book just published in Wellington: “Soil Fertility—Basis of Healthy Living.” In the first section of his little manual, Mr Matthews deals with soil fertility and the manner in which it is lost, too often wastefully, and with what this means to the home gardener and other Cultivators in the production of poor crops of inferior plants and vegetables, not infrequently stricken with disease. In text and illustrations an impressively strong case is made out for correcting these evils in the considerable degree to which that is practicable. So far as the home garden is concerned, Mr Matthews makes it clear that there need be no difficulty in establishing conditions of soil fertility which will ensure the production, in any reasonable conditions of location and climate, of good crops of vegetables possessed in full measure of nutritive value and ensuring to those who consume them some valuable safeguards against the onset of sickness and disease.

Full instructions arc given in the second part of the book on the preparation and use of compost as a means of restoring or maintaining the highest attainable fertility and productivity in garden and other soils. A description is given of several types of compost — the term broadly means “a pile of plant remains and other organic matter stacked for the purpose of rotting, the product of which eventually turns into a rich brown or black soil that can be used to increase fertility by returning, in varying degree, those substances taken from the soil by the growing plant”—including the complete compost which is stated to have been tried out in almost every district in New Zealand, with results uniformly successful.

Mr Matthews’s book should be of great value to home gardeners and other cultivators who have not already acquired a practical familiarity with the ancient art of composting.