Even at that it is not a bad plan to eat the stuff while
you can. The most peculiar thing about gardening is that
all of a sudden everything is too old to eat. Radishes
change over night from delicate young shoots not large
enough to put on the table into huge plants seven feet
high with a root like an Irish shillelagh. If you take
your eyes off a lettuce bed for a week the lettuces, not
ready to eat when you last looked at them, have changed
into a tall jungle of hollyhocks. Green peas are only
really green for about two hours. Before that they are
young peas; after that they are old peas. Cucumbers are
the worst case of all. They change overnight, from delicate
little bulbs obviously too slight and dainty to pick, to
old cases of yellow leather filled with seeds.
If I were ever to garden again, a thing which is out of
the bounds of possibility, I should wait until a certain
day and hour when all the plants were ripe, and then go
out with a gun and shoot them all dead, so that they
could grow no more.
But calculation, I repeat, is the bane of gardening. I
knew, among our group of food producers, a party of young
engineers, college men, who took an empty farm north of
the city as the scene of their summer operations.
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