Gardening indoors and under glass Author:Frederick Frye Rockwell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III SOILS, MANURES AND FERTILIZERS THE soil must furnish the whole foundation of plant life. For centuries those who have grown things have realize... more »d the vital importance of having the soil rich or well supplied with plant food; and if this is important in growing plants in the field or flower garden, where each vegetable or flower has from one to several cubic feet of earth in which to grow, how imperative it is to have rich soil in a pot or plant box where each plant may have but a few cubic inches! But the trouble is not so much in knowing that plants should be given rich soil, as to know how to furnish it. I well remember my first attempt at making soil rich and thinking how I would surprise my grandmother, who worked about her plants in pots every day of her life, and still did not have them as big as they grew in the flower garden. I had seen the hired man put fertilizer on the garden. That was the secret! So I got a wooden box about two-thirds full of mellow garden earth, and filled most of the remaining space with fertilizer, well mixed into the soil, as I had seen him fix it. I remember that my anxiety was not that I get toomuch fertilizer in the soil, but that I would take so much out of the bag that it would be missed. Great indeed was my chagrin and disappointment, twelve hours after carefully setting out and watering my would-be prize plants, to notice that they had perceptibly turned yellow and wilted. And I certainly had made the soil rich. So the problem is by no means as simple as might at first be supposed. Not only must sufficient plant food be added to the soil but it must be in certain forms, and neither too much nor too little may be given if the best results are to be attained. Now it is a fact established beyond all dispute that not on...« less