YOUR GARDEN AND MINE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 81, 10 January 1941, Page 43

YOUR GARDEN AND MINE

By

Ann Earncliff

Brown

(No. 55)

HE garden is apt to become a bit of a problem where holidays, hot and _ possibly dry spells, and vacations all create difficulties for the absentee owner. Naturally if your home is to be occupied you can look with unselfish pleasure at the peas almost leaping into the pot for the festive season; view with enthusiasm the ripening first "earlies" in the potato patch; and while making jam of every available raspberry and strawberry now ripe, decide that the chappie who has taken tlie house will need to get up bright and early, even as you yourself do if he hopes to beat the birds to a fruit diet. Yours is merely the difficulty of keeping up a generous frame of mind as you struggle to believe that "As a man sows, etc.’’, is true of enthusiastic gardeners who must take the annual holiday away from their beloved gardens. For the grower who closes his house for a long vacation it is difficult to arrange garden activities satisfactorily. Careful planning and planting can do much to help you to a late harvest. Before chaining the front gate, be sure that you have irrigated all growing crops likely to be useful on your return, Late sown runner beans to follow your main crop can climb happily if given a start and, provided they are sown on deeply trenched soil, they will stand up to most climatic conditions to be anticipated in the holiday period. If you

are going camping you will find it a good idea to pick and bottle all peas and French beans now ready. The final thinning of. carrots, those delightful juicy young things that are sweet either Taw or cooked, should be made. Carrots in rings or in company with peas can also be packed into your screw top jars. Sow your swedes, beet, etc., if they are not already well up, and in the semi-shade shake a scatter of radish and lettuce-very thinly. These will stand to you on your return. Also when you have canned or given away all the vegetables now at their best, put in a row or two of early maturing peas. Be careful of course to have these carefully bird-proofed. In the flower garden, having thoroughly soaked and where possible- mulched your borders, you can only trot round steadying a stake here, training a vine there, and wistfully think of that lucky beggar next door whose holidays come in June. No one you decide, could possibly regret leaving a garden in June. Oddly enough the man-next-door has a firm conviction that nobody in his senses could possibly feel blue at taking his vacation in the summer, Carefully picking the stamens out of his late flowering Christmas lilies, lest’ the pollen stain their purity, the man-next-door waves a cheerio to the departing campers. "Lucky dogs!" he sighs. "Still, I hate to think of their garden in a month’s time." But does he? I wonder! _