A Girl’s Garden

"A NEIGHBOR of mine in the village
  Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
  A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father         
  To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
  And he said, “Why not?”

In casting about for a corner
  He thought of an idle bit         
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
  And he said, “Just it.”

And he said, “That ought to make you
  An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength         
  On your slim-jim arm.”

It was not enough of a garden,
  Her father said, to plough;
So she had to work it all by hand,
  But she don’t mind now.         

She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow
  Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
  Her not-nice load.

And hid from anyone passing.         
  And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
  Of all things but weed.

A hill each of potatoes,
  Radishes, lettuce, peas,         
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
  And even fruit trees

And yes, she has long mistrusted
  That a cider apple tree
In bearing there to-day is hers,         
  Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany
  When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
  A great deal of none.         

Now when she sees in the village
  How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right,
  She says, “I know!

It’s as when I was a farmer——”         
  Oh, never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale
  To the same person twice."

-Robert Forst