It is an excellent plan to bury some of the vegetables named above in a dry place in the garden, for use in spring. They will be found as fresh and crisp as when put into the ground, if covered deep enough to protect them from frost.
HEALTH IN THE GARDEN. A CHAPTER EXPRESSLY FOR WOMEN READERS
The writer of this book often finds women who seem "all run down," without being able to tell of any positive physical ailment. Inquiry generally develops the fact that they have overworked; that they have been confined to the house the greater part of the time, busy with household matters, and that in caring for others they have neglected to care for themselves. Though I am not an M.D. I take the liberty of prescribing for patients of this class. My prescription is a course of treatment in the garden. I insist on their getting out of doors, where the air is pure, and the sunshine bright and warm, and Nature is waiting to give her pleasant companionship to whoever signifies a desire to make her acquaintance.
There is health in the garden. But because one has to dig for it some persons prefer to keep on enjoying their old miserableness day after day and year after year. These are the incurables--the "chronic" cases that one cannot expect to do much with or for. But those who are willing to exert themselves in an effort to get back the tone that life has lost to a considerable extent will find that work in the garden is a better tonic than our doctors have a record of in their pharmacopoeia.
The earth fairly tingles with life in spring, and by putting ourselves in contact with it we absorb some of this vitality. We breathe in the wine of a _new_ life, and we thrill with a thousand sensations that can come only from putting ourselves in close touch with Nature. You can tell a woman who needs a change from indoors to outdoors that she ought to take more exercise, but if you advise walking the chances are that she won't walk much. That kind of exercise doesn't appeal to her, and to make whatever kind of exercise she takes effective it must be something that affords her pleasure--something that she enjoys more than she does doing things from a "_sense of duty_," or simply because she has been _told_ to do it. What is needed is some form of exercise that has _an object in it_--a definite object, rather than the more or less abstract one of "regaining health."