My luck, tomato club booklet

My Luck

Mrs. H.E. Lance

[Image: 4H clover]

1915

"Activity is contagious. Looking where others look and conversing with the same things, we catch the charm which lured them".

Just a neighbor with ambitions never realized, hopes almost gone. with "relentless time shaking in palsied hands his almost exhausted hour-glass before her" - that was the source of my first desire for working in "Gods out-of-doors". An old infirm woman who loved her garden, talked her garden and lived in her garden. What an excellent club member she would have made in her youth!

Just plain gardening did not quite suit me. The tomato club was more attractive for, to a married woman with household cares, the financial returns savored more of the "glorious privilege of being independent". And so I have

come to tell of my first year's work in our club; to tell of numerous failures, of worries and some times unbusiness-like methods.

I purchased my seed from woodsons at Richmond in February - the stone and Carolina tomatoes - and planted them in March in a hot bed covered in canvas, out on the south side of my wash house. Extreme cold weather got quite a number of the outer plants; but then, I had enough for myself and for neighbor who wanted some for their garden.

The first of May found me busy in my garden. My husband had previously plowed the land to a depth of six inches with a turn plow, using half a ton of stable manure for fertilizer.

The row's were four feet apart, and I saw that all the clods were broken up. I watered the plants

as I set them out, and as luck would have it, we had no rain for a week and the watering process had to be kept up every day.

Each morning found me in my garden bright an early, but usually the little cut worms had visited my patch before me and my choicest plants - it seemed - would be cut down. I was always successful in finding the little destroyers and each time planted other plants in the place of the destroyed ones.

The plants were now growing off nicely, when I detected one with the wilt, and before this disease was stopped I had burned at least fifteen plants and set out others in their places.

By the middle of May there were numerous blooms all over my garden and the plants looked as if they were beginning to need support.

And there were quite a number of peple who knew just who we ought to treat our garden - and advised us accordingly - and when we secured strips from a near by lumber plant, and treated each little plant just one foot high with a stout stake measuring five feet, they looked wised and smiled. I, myself, had my doubts as to their reaching the top. The plants were now loosely tied to the stakes.

My husband bought some 8-8-3- fertilizer and this was applied and the pruning process started. All shoots were kept pulled off except the three most promising ones, and by the first of June the plants were sadly in need of tieing again.

And now how closely I watched the little green tomatoes, the undesirable shoots - and the clouds