CHAPTER XVI

SEED BABIES AND THEIR NURSES

“FIRST of all, we must understand that the seed has a coat which holds the living, sleeping baby. You see, the baby itself is so tiny and delicate that it would not be safe for it to be out without its seed coat. The wind and the sun would soon dry it up and kill it; then, too, it would die of hunger, for it is too little to find its own food. So its mother wraps the baby up in its strong seed coat, and puts its food in beside it, in the same coat. And there the seed baby lies sound asleep until—until everything is just right for it to wake up. The time it likes best to awaken is in Spring, when the weather is getting warm.

SEED BABIES IN THEIR COATS

You will put your seed babies, coats and all, into the warm ground early in the Spring, when they will feel like growing. Then you will dampen them, for without moisture and food, the seed baby will not wake up. The moisture swells the seed coat, and wakens the baby, and gets the food ready for the baby to eat.

The baby begins to eat the food its mother put inside the seed coat; it stretches itself, and pretty soon sends down into the earth a “teeny-weeny” rootlet. This rootlet takes a little food from the earth up to the baby. Oh, yes, plant soup, that is the kind of food it takes. Plant soup is mixed earth and water.

How good it is for the plant child, depends on how sweet the soil is, and how much humus or compost or manure food is in the soup. Humus soup tastes wonderfully good to the baby plant.

COTYLEDONS

Well, not only does the baby plant send down this tiny rootlet, but its tiny stem grows upward, and bursts through the seed coats and show two tiny leaves.

The two tiny leaves which appear on top of this stem, while down in the soil grew larger, threw open the seed coat, and came up to the surface for the air and sunshine.

These leaves are called the seed-leaves, or cŏt-ŷ-lē´-dŏns. They are not the true leaves of the plant baby, but are nurse-leaves which go ahead of the leaves of the baby plant, and really hold the true leaf of the baby between them.

These nurse-leaves take care of and feed the tiny plant baby until it can send out its own tiny leaves to gather air and digest food for itself.

If you pull up a Lima Bean Seed Baby after it has started to grow you will see the nurse-leaves.

No plant should be moved or transplanted until at least two true leaves, or leaves of its own, not nurse-leaves (cotyledons), have appeared.

Of course, when the little plants first come up there will be so many that each will choke the other, and so we must learn about—

THINNING OUT THE PLANTS

When the little plants are about two inches high, pull up all the weak plants, leaving the stronger ones from one to six inches apart, according to the kind of plants.

The little plants will need moisture, too—not just “watering,” but the moisture which lies far beneath the surface, and which can only be had by keeping the surface soil in good condition, so as when the plants grow one of the most important things we have to learn to do is—

TO CULTIVATE

“Cultivating” means breaking up the soil where it hardens about the plant. _It is the most important part of gardening_ after planting, except “thinning out.”

Cultivating is done by use of the hoe and “cultivator,” the rake-like tool which has but few prongs. Draw the cultivator between the rows of plants every day or two. Use the hoe in smaller spaces. Use the hoe to chop down weeds below the surface of the ground, being careful not to cut into the roots of the garden plants.

In breaking up the hard soil, or “cultivating,” the weeds are destroyed, but hard soil is a worse enemy of plant babies than weeds even, although every child knows how dreadful it is for a garden to let weeds steal all the food from the baby plants.

{ air, Baby plants need { food, { moisture.

Now if there is a hard crust of soil around the roots, they cannot get the _air_; so we _cultivate_ or break up the hard soil to give them air.

Baby plants cannot get _food_ if big strong weeds steal it from them; so we _cultivate_ to kill the weeds.

Baby plants need _moisture_, perhaps more than anything else, so we cultivate; for cultivating keeps in the moisture that is down in the soil. I will explain this in a very little while.

So you see _Cultivating_ is the most important garden work.

WATERING

Perhaps you think watering the garden most important. If so, you are mistaken. Yes, the garden must be watered from time to time; but when it is watered it should be drenched soaking wet, never sprinkled a little every day or two. One soaking in a week is better than a light sprinkling every day. Light sprinkling brings the roots to the surface, where the sun dries them up in a short time. On the other hand, the rain or a thorough drenching soaks down, down, down, into the earth, where it is stored up for future use.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTIVATING

Now, I am going to tell you why cultivating is so important in regard to moisture.

If the soil is all soft and fine and loose, the rain can easily run down through it to the roots.

If it were hard, the water would run off to lower ground. That’s easily understood.

But immediately after the rain, when the sun comes out and the wind blows, the surface of the soil begins to dry.

Then the sun “coaxes” and “pulls” the water up, up, up, to the surface it has dried, something like the way you pull the juice of an orange up through a stick of lemon candy. Now let me ask you—could you pull much orange juice through the stick of candy if the stick of candy were crumbled or broken apart at the top? No, you could not.

Neither can the sun pull the moisture up through the tiny little tubes in the soil if we break those little tubes and crumble the tops into dust. No, you need not look for these tubes, Mary Frances; they are too tiny for you to see, but they act very much like blotting paper to bring the under moisture up to the surface, and unless they are broken and crumbled, the deep earth moisture goes sailing off into the air to meet the sun, as fast as if it ran out of a little spigot running it off, and the poor plant baby dries up for want of deep moisture near its roots.

How shall we break these tubes (the sun’s lemon candy stick)?

Yes, that’s right, Mary Frances!

By CULTIVATION.

* * * * *

“Jiminy! what a long lesson!” exclaimed Billy, wiping his forehead, “What’re you going to do for me, Mary Frances, for all this wonderful instruction?”

“I’ll give a dinner in your honor, Professor, and let you invite whom you please.”

“On one condition,” said Billy, “that every thing we have will come out of your garden!”

“Agreed!”

“To-morrow we begin real work and put into practice some of these remarkable lectures,” added Billy earnestly.

“Oh, how glad I am!” exclaimed Mary Frances. “Billy, it seems too wonderful! My, I’m glad Mother and Father sent you away to school, though I did miss you terribly, but you learned such a lot that it makes up for it.”

“Augh! Mary Frances, you make a fellow feel queer, I wasn’t such a perfect little _angel_ in _school_.”

“Oh, certainly not, certainly not, Billy,” laughed Mary Frances, “that’s the wonder of it—to think a bad boy like you could learn so much, that’s the puzzle to me.”

“Humm!” said Billy to himself as he looked after Mary Frances’ fleeting figure, “It’s lucky for that girl that I’m a scout.”