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CHAPTER XX

CONCLUSION

It is with a feeling in which there is something of fear that I close
these pages--fear that many of those little things which become second
nature to the grower of plants and seem unimportant, but which
sometimes are just the things that the beginner wants to know about,
may have been inadvertently left out. In every operation described,
however, I have tried to mention all necessary details. I would urge
the reader, nevertheless, to study as thoroughly as possible all the
garden problems with which he will find himself confronted and to this
end recommend that he read several of the many garden books which are
now to be had. It must be to his advantage to see even the same
subjects presented again from other points of view. The more familiar
he can make himself, both in theory and in practice, with all the
multitude of operations which modern gardening involves, the greater
success will he attain.

Personally, the further I have gone into the growing of things--and
that has now become my business as well as my pleasure--the more
absorbingly interesting I find it. Each season, each crop, offers its
own problems and a reward for the correct solution of them. It is a
work which, even to the beginner, presents the opportunity of deducting
new conclusions, trying new experiments, making new discoveries. It is
a work which offers pleasant and healthy recreation to the many whose
days must be, for the most part, spent in office or shop; and it gives
very substantial help in the world-old problem of making both ends
meet.

Let the garden beginner be not disappointed if he does not succeed, for
the first season or two, or possibly three, with everything he plants.
There is usually a preventable reason for the failure, and studious
observation will reveal it. With the modern success in the application
of insecticides and fungicides, and the extension of the practice of
irrigation, the subject of gardening begins to be reduced to a
scientific and (what is more to the point) a sure basis. We are getting
control of the uncertain factors. All this affects first, perhaps, the
person who grows for profit, but with our present wide circulation of
every new idea and discovery in such matters, it must reach soon to
every remote home garden patch which is cared for by a wide-awake
gardener.

Such a person, from the fact that he or she is reading a new garden
book, I take the reader to be. I hope this volume, condensed though it
is, has added to your fund of practical garden information; that it
will help to grow that proverbial second blade of grass. I have only to
add, as I turn again to the problems waiting for me in field and under
glass, that I wish you all success in your work--the making of better
gardens in America.