FINING.

This treatment will reduce to a minimum the labor of finally preparing
the seed- or plant-bed with the iron rake (or, on large gardens, with
the Meeker harrow). After the finishing touches, the soil should be
left so even and smooth that you can with difficulty bring yourself to
step on it. Get it "like a table"--and then you are ready to begin
gardening.
Whatever implements are used, do not forget the great importance of
making the soil thoroughly fine, not only at the surface, but as far as
possible below Even under the necessity of repetition. I want to
emphasize this again by stating the four chief benefits, of this
thorough pulverization: First, it adds materially in making the plant
foods in the soil available for use; secondly, it induces the growing
plants to root deeply, and thus to a greater extent to escape the
drying influence of the sun; thirdly, it enables the soil to absorb
rain evenly, where it falls, which would otherwise either run off and
be lost altogether, or collect in the lower parts of the garden; and
last, and most important, it enables the soil to retain moisture thus
stored, as in a subterranean storage tank, but where the plants can
draw upon it, long after carelessly prepared and shallow soils are
burning up in the long protracted drouths which we seem to be
increasingly certain of getting during the late summer.
Prepare your garden deeply, thoroughly, carefully, in addition to
making it rich, and you may then turn to those more interesting
operations outlined in the succeeding sections, with the well founded
assurance that your thought and labor will be rewarded by a garden so
remarkably more successful than the average garden is, that all your
extra pains-taking will be richly repaid.