How does your vegetable garden grow?;

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With each new spring, more and
more people react to the lure of
colorful seed catalogs and the shock
of spiraling food prices by spading
up a garden patch and taking their
chances with the whims of nature,
marauding insects and soil of dubi­ous
fertility. This summer an esti­mated
thirty-five million family
vegetable plots are busy producing
a variety of crops ranging from the
common to the exotic, with an
equally wide range of quality.
Many H&S families have
already found that gardening is fun
and have encouraged their friends
to give it a try. Each spring manager
Dean DuCray of the Executive
Office Research Department grows
his own special blight-resistant
tomato plants and makes them
available to his fellow accountants
who annually till the soil of New
Jersey, with results that have jest­ingly
been described as ranging
from gourmet to garbage.
Gardening can and should be
fun. But it is more fun if it is done
right, and this is where a little
advance planning and preparation
can pay off in high yield and superb flavor. Don't expect a big
dollar saving, particularly for the first year. The average home
garden will save a family only about $75 during the season (if you
don't count labor), but the savings can be much higher if
m crops are frozen or stored for use through the winter.
The urge to garden afflicts most people about the
•pl-^f
same time as the annual attack of spring fever. The
better gardens, however, are begun in the summer and
B fall, with the mulching of grass clippings, leaves, cobs, rinds
and other foliage and the preparation of a compost bed.
A compost bed in an out-of-the-way corner of your property is
an easy and inexpensive way to upgrade the soil quality to
support the high-yield home garden year after year. The mulch
bed or compost pile is simply alternate layers of several inches of
organic matter with a light dusting of lime and either manure or a
handful of high-nitrogen fertilizer, needed to feed the bacteria
that decompose the organic matter. A mulching attachment
which blocks the outlet chute of your power lawnmower permits
the chopping of huge quantities of leaves into fingernail-size
pieces which compact well, stay moist and will not blow away.
Nail some wide boards together to keep the pile in place.
As the layers of the bed build up, the top should be dished in
slightly and holes made in the pile with a rake handle to collect
rain and keep the compost wet. As the organic matter decom­poses,
the temperature inside the pile can reach 150 degrees or