Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 July 1874 — Teach Your Children Practical Horti culture. [ARTICLE]

Teach Your Children Practical Horti culture.

As children have everything to learn, it is important that some competent and patient person should give them encouraging instruction about preparing the soil and planting seed. A great many intelligent and highly-educated adults know nothing about gardening. How, then, can young children be expected to prepare the ground or put in the seed without first being taught how to do it? If children are at ail inclined to work in the garden,day out a plat of rich land for the boys where they may raise all kinds of vegetables and a little spring grain; and designate another plat as a flower garden for the girls, and manure-t he soil bountifully and let it be plowed or spaded deep. Then encourage the children to mark out the ground in drills, and make small beds here and there for raising only a few specimens of every valuable vegstable that is usually produced in kitchen gardens. Provide a bountiful supply of flower seeds for the girls, and encourage them tjo plant, cultivate and love flowers. See also that they have suitable tpols to work with, and do not turn them away with an old hoe or a miserable spade that a skillful gardener would reject with scorn. The heavy labor of preparing the soil should be performed by a strong man, as the strength of children soon fails when engaged in such fatiguing la bor as spading the garden, especially if the soil be heavy. If required to do the spading themselves they often become disheartened in their gardening operations ; and for the want of a little assistance they abandon the enterprise and (.engage in something else. By means of a few dimes’worth of seed and a few bourn’’ work and a few words small children may be taught lessons in agricjulture, horticulture and floriculture that will be of untold value to them when they grow up.—AT. Y. Herald,