Now, there is my corn, two or three inches high this 18th of May, and apparently having no fear of a frost.  I was hoeing it this morning for the first time,—­it is not well usually to hoe corn until about the 18th of May,—­when Polly came out to look at the Lima beans.  She seemed to think the poles had come up beautifully.  I thought they did look well:  they are a fine set of poles, large and well grown, and stand straight.  They were inexpensive, too.  The cheapness came about from my cutting them on another man’s land, and he did not know it.  I have not examined this transaction in the moral light of gardening; but I know people in this country take great liberties at the polls.  Polly noticed that the beans had not themselves come up in any proper sense, but that the dirt had got off from them, leaving them uncovered.  She thought it would be well to sprinkle a slight layer of dirt over them; and I, indulgently, consented.  It occurred to me, when she had gone, that beans always come up that way,—­wrong end first; and that what they wanted was light, and not dirt.

Observation.—­Woman always did, from the first, make a muss in a garden.

I inherited with my garden a large patch of raspberries.  Splendid berry the raspberry, when the strawberry has gone.  This patch has grown into such a defiant attitude, that you could not get within several feet of it.  Its stalks were enormous in size, and cast out long, prickly arms in all directions; but the bushes were pretty much all dead.  I have walked into them a good deal with a pruning-knife; but it is very much like fighting original sin.  The variety is one that I can recommend.  I think it is called Brinckley’s Orange.  It is exceedingly prolific, and has enormous stalks.  The fruit is also said to be good; but that does not matter so much, as the plant does not often bear in this region.  The stalks seem to be biennial institutions; and as they get about their growth one year, and bear the next year, and then die, and the winters here nearly always kill them, unless you take them into the house (which is inconvenient if you have a family of small children), it is very difficult to induce the plant to flower and fruit.  This is the greatest objection there is to this sort of raspberry.  I think of keeping these for discipline, and setting out some others, more hardy sorts, for fruit.

SECOND WEEK

Next to deciding when to start your garden, the most important matter is, what to put in it.  It is difficult to decide what to order for dinner on a given day:  how much more oppressive is it to order in a lump an endless vista of dinners, so to speak!  For, unless your garden is a boundless prairie (and mine seems to me to be that when I hoe it on hot days), you must make a selection, from the great variety of vegetables, of those you will raise in it; and you feel rather bound to supply your own table from your own garden, and to eat only as you have sown.