Daddy Takes Us to the Garden Part 5

"Not yet," answered Hal.

"But we got tomato seeds planted in the house," said Mab.

"Yes, and I must do that too. We'll see who'll have the finest garden,"

went on Mr. Porter. "How's your poodle dog?"

"Oh, we got him shut up so he can't hurt your garden," Hal said.

"Don't worry about that yet," went on the neighbor. "I haven't planted any seeds yet, and shall not until it gets warmer. So you may let your dog run loose."

"All right. I guess I will," cried Hal, running back to the house.

"You'll be late for school!" warned Mab.

"I'll run fast!" promised her brother. "Roly-Poly cried when I shut him up. I want to let him out."

Soon the little dog came running out of the barn where Hal had locked him.

Over into Mr. Porter's yard ran Roly and Sammie laughed when he saw Hal's pet rolling around in the pile of dried leaves Mr. Porter had raked together.

"Roly, you be a good dog!" warned Mab, shaking her finger at him.

"I get him a cookie!" said Sammie with a laugh as he toddled toward the house.

"Sammie likes dogs," said his father as Hal and Mab hurried on to school.

Mr. Blake was away longer than he thought he would be, and it was over a week before he came back home. Each day Hal and Mab had placed the box of tomato seeds in the warm sun before going to school, moving it when they came home at noon and in the afternoon they also changed it so that the soil would always be where the warm sun could s.h.i.+ne on it. They sprinkled water in the box, as their father had told them to do.

Then, the day when Daddy Blake came back from his business trip, Hal, looking at the tomato box, cried:

"Oh, Mab! Look! There are a lot of little green leaves here."

"Yes, the tomatoes are beginning to grow," said Daddy Blake, when he had taken a look.

"What makes the seeds grow and green leaves come out?" asked Hal.

"Well, as I said, Mother Nature does it and no one can tell how," said Daddy Blake. "But somewhere inside this tiny little thing," and he held out in his hand a tomato seed, "somewhere there is hidden a spark of life.

What it looks like we can not say. It is deep in the heart of the seed."

"Do seeds have hearts?" asked Mab.

"Well, no, not exactly," her father answered. "But we speak of the middle of a tree as it's heart and I suppose the middle of a seed, where its life is, is its heart. So this seed is really alive, though it doesn't seem so."

"It looks like a little yellow stone--the kind that comes in sand," spoke Hal.

"And yet it is alive," said his father. "It can not move about now, though when it is planted it begins to grow and it can move. It can push its leaves up from under the earth. Just now it is asleep, and has no life that we can see."

"What will bring it to life and make it wake up?" asked Hal.

"The warm dirt in which it is planted, the sunlight, the air and the water you sprinkle on it," said Mr. Blake. "If you kept this seed cold and dry it might sleep for many many years, but as soon as you put it under the warm, wet soil, and set the box of dirt where the sun can s.h.i.+ne on it, then the seed begins to awaken. Something inside it--a germ some call it--begins to swell. It gets larger--the seed is germinating. The hard outside sh.e.l.l, or husk, gets soft and breaks open. The heart inside swells larger and larger. A tiny root appears and begins to dig its way down deeper in the ground to find things to eat. At the same time another part of the seed turns into leaves and these grow up. It is the green leaves you see first, peeping up above the ground, that tell you the seed has germinated and is growing."

"Isn't it funny!" said Hal. "One part of the seed grows down and the other part grows up."

"Yes," said Daddy Blake. "That's the way seeds grow. Each day you will see these little tomato plants growing more and more, and, as soon as they are large enough, we will set them out in the garden."

Hal and Mab thought it was wonderful that a single, tiny seed of the tomato--a seed that looked scarcely larger than the head of a pin--should have locked up in its heart such things as roots and leaves, and that, after a while, great, big red tomatoes would hang down from the green tomato vine--all from one little seed.

"It's wonderful--just like when the man in the show took a rabbit, a guinea pig and a lot of silk ribbon out of Daddy's hat," spoke Hal.

"It is more wonderful," said Mr. Blake. "For the man in the show put the things in my hat by a trick, when you were not looking, and only took them out again to make you think they were there all the while. But roots, seeds and tomatoes are not exactly inside the seed all the while. The germ--the life--is there, and after it starts to grow the leaves, roots and tomatoes are made from the soil, the air, the water and the suns.h.i.+ne."

"Are there tomatoes in the air?" asked Mab.

"Well, if it were not for the things in the air, the oxygen, the nitrogen and other gases, about which you are too young to understand now, we could not live grow, and neither could plants. Plants also have to have water to drink, as we do, and food to eat, only they eat the things found in the dirt, and we can not do that. At least not until they are changed into fruits, grain or vegetables."

Hal and Mab never tired looking at the tomato plants growing in the box in the house. Each day the tiny green leaves became larger and raised themselves higher and higher from the earth.

"Soon they will be large enough to transplant, or set out in the garden,"

said Daddy Blake.

Two or three days after their father had told Hal and Mab why seeds grow, the children, coming home from school, saw something strange in their garden.

There was a man, with a team of horses and the brown earth was being torn up by a big s.h.i.+ny thing which the horses were pulling as the man drove them.

"Oh, what's that in our garden?" cried Hal to Uncle Pennywait.

"It's a man plowing," said Hal's Uncle.

"But won't he spoil the garden?" Mab wanted to know.

"He's just starting to make it," Uncle Pennywait answered. "Didn't Daddy Blake tell you that the ground must be plowed or chopped up, and then finely pulverized or smoothed, so the seeds would grow better?"

"Oh, yet, so he did," Hal said.

"Well, this is the first start of making a garden," went on Uncle Pennywait. "The ground must be plowed or spaded. Spading is all right for a small garden, but when you have a large one, or a farm, you must use a plow."

Mr. Blake owned a large yard back of his house, and next door, on the other side from where the new Porter family lived, was a large vacant lot. The children's father had hired this lot to use as part of his garden.

Hal and Mab watched the man plowing. He held the two curved handles of the plow, and it was the sharp steel "share" of this that they had seen s.h.i.+ning in the sun as it cut through the brown soil. A plow cuts through the soil as the horses pull it after them, and it is so shaped that the upper part of the earth is turned over, bringing up to the top, where the sun can s.h.i.+ne on it, the underneath part. The undersoil is richer and better for seeds to start growing in than the upper part, where the rain may wash away the plant-food things that are needed to make a good garden.

"But Daddy said the ground had to be SMOOTH to make a garden," said Mab.

"The plowing man is making it all ROUGH."

"Yes, it does look rough now," said Daddy Blake, as he came along just then, in time to watch the man plowing. "Those long lines of overturned soil which you children see are called furrows."

"Could you plant anything in them?" asked Hal.

"Well, you could, yes. But it would not grow very well, and when the corn, beans or whatever you planted came up, you could not work around them well to cut down the weeds. It would be too rough. So after the man has plowed the ground he will harrow it."

"What's that?" asked Hal