I should like also to give away, either to the Red Cross or to anything else, ten packets of radish seed (the early curled variety, I think), fifteen packets of cucumber seed (the long succulent variety, I believe it says), and twenty packets of onion seed (the Yellow Danvers, distinguished1, I understand, for its edible2 flavour and its nutritious3 properties). It is not likely that I shall ever, on this side of the grave, plant onion seed again. All these things I have with me. My vegetables are to come after me by freight. They are booked from Simcoe County to Montreal; at present they are, I believe, passing through Schenectady. But they will arrive later all right. They were seen going through Detroit last week, moving west. It is the first time that I ever sent anything by freight anywhere. I never understood before the wonderful organization of the railroads. But they tell me that there is a bad congestion4 of freight down South this month. If my vegetables get tangled5 up in that there is no telling when they will arrive.
In other words, I am one of the legion of men—quiet, determined6, resolute7 men—who went out last spring to plant the land, and who are now back.
With me—and I am sure that I speak for all the others as well—it was not a question of mere8 pleasure; it was no love of gardening for its own sake that inspired us. It was a plain national duty. What we said to ourselves was: “This war has got to stop. The men in the trenches9 thus far have failed to stop it. Now let us try. The whole thing,” we argued, “is a plain matter of food production.”
“If we raise enough food the Germans are bound to starve. Very good. Let us kill them.”
I suppose there was never a more grimly determined set of men went out from the cities than those who went out last May, as I did, to conquer the food problem. I don’t mean to say that each and every one of us actually left the city. But we all “went forth” in the metaphorical11 sense. Some of the men cultivated back gardens; others took vacant lots; some went out into the suburbs; and others, like myself, went right out into the country.
We are now back. Each of us has with him his Paris Green, his hoe and the rest of his radish seed.
The time has, therefore, come for a plain, clear statement of our experience. We have, as everybody knows, failed. We have been beaten hack12 all along the line. Our potatoes are buried in a jungle of autumn burdocks. Our radishes stand seven feet high, uneatable. Our tomatoes, when last seen, were greener than they were at the beginning of August, and getting greener every week. Our celery looked as delicate as a maidenhair fern. Our Indian corn was nine feet high with a tall feathery spike13 on top of that, but no sign of anything eatable about it from top to bottom.
I look back with a sigh of regret at those bright, early days in April when we were all buying hoes, and talking soil and waiting for the snow to be off the ground. The street cars, as we went up and down to our offices, were a busy babel of garden talk. There was a sort of farmer-like geniality14 in the air. One spoke15 freely to strangers. Every man with a hoe was a friend. Men chewed straws in their offices, and kept looking out of windows to pretend to themselves that they were afraid it might blow up rain. “Got your tomatoes in?” one man would ask another as they went up in the elevator. “Yes, I got mine in yesterday,” the other would answer, “But I’m just a little afraid that this east wind may blow up a little frost. What we need now is growing weather.” And the two men would drift off together from the elevator door along the corridor, their heads together in friendly colloquy16.
I have always regarded a lawyer as a man without a soul. There is one who lives next door to me to whom I have not spoken in five years. Yet when I saw him one day last spring heading for the suburbs in a pair of old trousers with a hoe in one hand and a box of celery plants in the other I felt that I loved the man. I used to think that stock-brokers were mere sordid17 calculating machines. Now that I have seen whole firms of them busy at the hoe, wearing old trousers that reached to their armpits and were tied about the waist with a polka dot necktie, I know that they are men. I know that there are warm hearts beating behind those trousers.
Old trousers, I say. Where on earth did they all come from in such a sudden fashion last spring? Everybody had them. Who would suspect that a man drawing a salary of ten thousand a year was keeping in reserve a pair of pepper-and-salt breeches, four sizes too large for him, just in case a war should break out against Germany! Talk of German mobilization! I doubt whether the organizing power was all on their side after all. At any rate it is estimated that fifty thousand pairs of old trousers were mobilized in Montreal in one week.
But perhaps it was not a case of mobilization, or deliberate preparedness. It was rather an illustration of the primitive18 instinct that is in all of us and that will out in “war time.” Any man worth the name would wear old breeches all the time if the world would let him. Any man will wind a polka dot tie round his waist in preference to wearing patent braces19. The makers20 of the ties know this. That is why they make the tie four feet long. And in the same way if any manufacturer of hats will put on the market an old fedora, with a limp rim10 and a mark where the ribbon used to be but is not—a hat guaranteed to be six years old, well weathered, well rained on, and certified21 to have been walked over by a herd22 of cattle—that man will make and deserve a fortune.
These at least were the fashions of last May. Alas23, where are they now? The men that wore them have relapsed again into tailor-made tweeds. They have put on hard new hats. They are shining their boots again. They are shaving again, not merely on Saturday night, but every day. They are sinking back into civilization.
Yet those were bright times and I cannot forbear to linger on them. Nor the least pleasant feature was our rediscovery of the morning. My neighbour on the right was always up at five. My neighbour on the left was out and about by four. With the earliest light of day, little columns of smoke rose along our street from the kitchen ranges where our wives were making coffee for us before the servants got up. By six o’clock the street was alive and busy with friendly salutations. The milkman seemed a late comer, a poor, sluggish24 fellow who failed to appreciate the early hours of the day. A man, we found, might live through quite a little Iliad of adventure before going to his nine o’clock office.
“How will you possibly get time to put in a garden?” I asked of one of my neighbours during this glad period of early spring before I left for the country. “Time!” he exclaimed. “Why, my dear fellow, I don’t have to be down at the warehouse25 till eight-thirty.”
Later in the summer I saw the wreck26 of his garden, choked with weeds. “Your garden,” I said, “is in poor shape.” “Garden!” he said indignantly. “How on earth can I find time for a garden? Do you realize that I have to be down at the warehouse at eight-thirty?”
When I look back to our bright beginnings our failure seems hard indeed to understand. It is only when I survey the whole garden movement in melancholy27 retrospect28 that I am able to see some of the reasons for it.
The principal one, I think, is the question of the season. It appears that the right time to begin gardening is last year. For many things it is well to begin the year before last. For good results one must begin even sooner. Here, for example, are the directions, as I interpret them, for growing asparagus. Having secured a suitable piece of ground, preferably a deep friable29 loam30 rich in nitrogen, go out three years ago and plough or dig deeply. Remain a year inactive, thinking. Two years ago pulverize31 the soil thoroughly32. Wait a year. As soon as last year comes set out the young shoots. Then spend a quiet winter doing nothing. The asparagus will then be ready to work at this year.
This is the rock on which we were wrecked33. Few of us were men of sufficient means to spend several years in quiet thought waiting to begin gardening. Yet that is, it seems, the only way to begin. Asparagus demands a preparation of four years. To fit oneself to grow strawberries requires three years. Even for such humble34 things as peas, beans, and lettuce35 the instructions inevitably36 read, “plough the soil deeply in the preceeding autumn.” This sets up a dilemma37. Which is the preceeding autumn? If a man begins gardening in the spring he is too late for last autumn and too early for this. On the other hand if he begins in the autumn he is again too late; he has missed this summer’s crop. It is, therefore, ridiculous to begin in the autumn and impossible to begin in the spring.
This was our first difficulty. But the second arose from the question of the soil itself. All the books and instructions insist that the selection of the soil is the most important part of gardening. No doubt it is. But, if a man has already selected his own backyard before he opens the book, what remedy is there? All the books lay stress on the need of “a deep, friable loam full of nitrogen.” This I have never seen. My own plot of land I found on examination to contain nothing but earth. I could see no trace of nitrogen. I do not deny the existence of loam. There may be such a thing. But I am admitting now in all humility38 of mind that I don’t know what loam is. Last spring my fellow gardeners and I all talked freely of the desirability of “a loam.” My own opinion is that none of them had any clearer ideas about it than I had. Speaking from experience, I should say that the only soils are earth, mud and dirt. There are no others.
But I leave out the soil. In any case we were mostly forced to disregard it. Perhaps a more fruitful source of failure even than the lack of loam was the attempt to apply calculation and mathematics to gardening. Thus, if one cabbage will grow in one square foot of ground, how many cabbages will grow in ten square feet of ground? Ten? Not at all. The answer is one. You will find as a matter of practical experience that however many cabbages you plant in a garden plot there will be only one that will really grow. This you will presently come to speak of as the cabbage. Beside it all the others (till the caterpillars39 finally finish their existence) will look but poor, lean things. But the cabbage will be a source of pride and an object of display to visitors; in fact it would ultimately have grown to be a real cabbage, such as you buy for ten cents at any market, were it not that you inevitably cut it and eat it when it is still only half-grown.
This always happens to the one cabbage that is of decent size, and to the one tomato that shows signs of turning red (it is really a feeble green-pink), and to the only melon that might have lived to ripen40. They get eaten. No one but a practised professional gardener can live and sleep beside a melon three-quarters ripe and a cabbage two-thirds grown without going out and tearing it off the stem.
Even at that it is not a bad plan to eat the stuff while you can. The most peculiar41 thing about gardening is that all of a sudden everything is too old to eat. Radishes change over night from delicate young shoots not large enough to put on the table into huge plants seven feet high with a root like an Irish shillelagh. If you take your eyes off a lettuce bed for a week the lettuces42, not ready to eat when you last looked at them, have changed into a tall jungle of hollyhocks. Green peas are only really green for about two hours. Before that they are young peas; after that they are old peas. Cucumbers are the worst case of all. They change overnight, from delicate little bulbs obviously too slight and dainty to pick, to old cases of yellow leather filled with seeds.
If I were ever to garden again, a thing which is out of the bounds of possibility, I should wait until a certain day and hour when all the plants were ripe, and then go out with a gun and shoot them all dead, so that they could grow no more.
But calculation, I repeat, is the bane of gardening. I knew, among our group of food producers, a party of young engineers, college men, who took an empty farm north of the city as the scene of their summer operations. They took their coats off and applied43 college methods. They ran out, first, a base line AB, and measured off from it lateral44 spurs MN, OP, QR, and so on. From these they took side angles with a theodolite so as to get the edges of each of the separate plots of their land absolutely correct. I saw them working at it all through one Saturday afternoon in May. They talked as they did it of the peculiar ignorance of the so-called practical farmer. He never—so they agreed—uses his head. He never—I think I have their phrase correct—stops to think. In laying out his ground for use, it never occurs to him to try to get the maximum result from a given space. If a farmer would only realize that the contents of a circle represent the maximum of space enclosable in a given perimeter45, and that a circle is merely a function of its own radius46, what a lot of time he would save.
These young men that I speak of laid out their field engineer-fashion with little white posts at even distances. They made a blueprint47 of the whole thing as they planted it. Every corner of it was charted out. The yield was calculated to a nicety. They had allowed for the fact that some of the stuff might fail to grow by introducing what they called “a coefficient of error.” By means of this and by reducing the variation of autumn prices to a mathematical curve, those men not only knew already in the middle of May the exact yield of their farm to within half a bushel (they allowed, they said, a variation of half a bushel per fifty acres), but they knew beforehand within a few cents the market value that they would receive. The figures, as I remember them, were simply amazing. It seemed incredible that fifty acres could produce so much. Yet there were the plain facts in front of one, calculated out. The thing amounted practically to a revolution in farming. At least it ought to have. And it would have if those young men had come again to hoe their field. But it turned out, most unfortunately, that they were busy. To their great regret they were too busy to come. They had been working under a free-and-easy arrangement. Each man was to give what time he could every Saturday. It was left to every man’s honour to do what he could. There was no compulsion. Each man trusted the others to be there. In fact the thing was not only an experiment in food production, it was also a new departure in social co-operation. The first Saturday that those young men worked there were, so I have been told, seventy-five of them driving in white stakes and running lines. The next Saturday there were fifteen of them planting potatoes. The rest were busy. The week after that there was one man hoeing weeds. After that silence fell upon the deserted48 garden, broken only by the cry of the chick-a-dee and the choo-choo feeding on the waving heads of the thistles.
But I have indicated only two or three of the ways of failing at food production. There are ever so many more. What amazes me, in returning to the city, is to find the enormous quantities of produce of all sorts offered for sale in the markets. It is an odd thing that last spring, by a queer oversight49, we never thought, any of us, of this process of increasing the supply. If every patriotic50 man would simply take a large basket and go to the market every day and buy all that he could carry away there need be no further fear of a food famine.
And, meantime, my own vegetables are on their way. They are in a soap box with bars across the top, coming by freight. They weigh forty-six pounds, including the box. They represent the result of four months’ arduous51 toil52 in sun, wind, and storm. Yet it is pleasant to think that I shall be able to feed with them some poor family of refugees during the rigour of the winter. Either that or give them to the hens. I certainly won’t eat the rotten things myself.
点击
收听单词发音
收听单词发音 |
1
distinguished
|
|
| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
2
edible
|
|
| n.食品，食物；adj.可食用的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
3
nutritious
|
|
| adj.有营养的，营养价值高的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
4
congestion
|
|
| n.阻塞，消化不良 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
5
tangled
|
|
| adj. 纠缠的，紊乱的 动词tangle的过去式和过去分词 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
6
determined
|
|
| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
7
resolute
|
|
| adj.坚决的，果敢的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
8
mere
|
|
| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
9
trenches
|
|
| 深沟，地沟( trench的名词复数 )； 战壕 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
10
rim
|
|
| n.(圆物的)边，轮缘；边界 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
11
metaphorical
|
|
| a.隐喻的，比喻的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
12
hack
|
|
| n.劈，砍，出租马车；v.劈，砍，干咳 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
13
spike
|
|
| n.长钉，钉鞋；v.以大钉钉牢，使...失效 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
14
geniality
|
|
| n.和蔼，诚恳；愉快 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
15
spoke
|
|
| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
16
colloquy
|
|
| n.谈话，自由讨论 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
17
sordid
|
|
| adj.肮脏的，不干净的，卑鄙的，暗淡的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
18
primitive
|
|
| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
19
braces
|
|
| n.吊带，背带；托架( brace的名词复数 )；箍子；括弧；（儿童）牙箍v.支住( brace的第三人称单数 )；撑牢；使自己站稳；振作起来 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
20
makers
|
|
| n.制造者，制造商（maker的复数形式） | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
21
certified
|
|
| a.经证明合格的；具有证明文件的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
22
herd
|
|
| n.兽群，牧群；vt.使集中，把…赶在一起 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
23
alas
|
|
| int.唉(表示悲伤、忧愁、恐惧等) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
24
sluggish
|
|
| adj.懒惰的，迟钝的，无精打采的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
25
warehouse
|
|
| n.仓库；vt.存入仓库 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
26
wreck
|
|
| n.失事，遇难；沉船；vt.(船等)失事，遇难 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
27
melancholy
|
|
| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
28
retrospect
|
|
| n.回顾，追溯；v.回顾，回想，追溯 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
29
friable
|
|
| adj.易碎的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
30
loam
|
|
| n.沃土 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
31
pulverize
|
|
| v.研磨成粉；摧毁 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
32
thoroughly
|
|
| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
33
wrecked
|
|
| adj.失事的，遇难的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
34
humble
|
|
| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
35
lettuce
|
|
| n.莴苣；生菜 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
36
inevitably
|
|
| adv.不可避免地；必然发生地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
37
dilemma
|
|
| n.困境，进退两难的局面 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
38
humility
|
|
| n.谦逊，谦恭 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
39
caterpillars
|
|
| n.毛虫( caterpillar的名词复数 )；履带 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
40
ripen
|
|
| vt.使成熟；vi.成熟 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
41
peculiar
|
|
| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
42
lettuces
|
|
| n.莴苣，生菜（ lettuce的名词复数 ）；生菜叶 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
43
applied
|
|
| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
44
lateral
|
|
| adj.侧面的，旁边的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
45
perimeter
|
|
| n.周边，周长，周界 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
46
radius
|
|
| n.半径，半径范围；有效航程，范围，界限 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
47
blueprint
|
|
| n.蓝图，设计图，计划；vt.制成蓝图，计划 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
48
deserted
|
|
| adj.荒芜的，荒废的，无人的，被遗弃的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
49
oversight
|
|
| n.勘漏，失察，疏忽 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
50
patriotic
|
|
| adj.爱国的，有爱国心的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
51
arduous
|
|
| adj.艰苦的，费力的，陡峭的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
52
toil
|
|
| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
| 欢迎访问英文小说网 |