July 1939

ACROSS THE Editor's Desk

IT'S July, open season for vacations. On the highways cars whiz by, overflowing with boys and dogs and fishing tackle and golf clubs, with maybe a canoe perched perilously on top-- all out for a good time. Railway stations and airports are scenes of happy partings. Piers of ocean-going liners foam ankle-deep with bright serpentine. For a vacation, by its very name, implies going away: going away from our homes, our jobs, our rounds of routine.

TATTLE TALES

The Frontispiece: If there's one thing typical of July, along with heat, the Fourth, and freckles, it's a barefoot boy with a dog. We can't prove that this boy's barefooted-- but bare feet always go with freckles in the poets' tales, and this youngster has freckles aplenty.

THE DIARY of a Plain Dirt Gardener

July 7 After breakfast, nothing special on my mind, I set forth to the back to catch up on weeds and pests and summer-propagation work. Now there be some folks who're all for show. When they set out to get the place all weeded and cultivated, they begin in front, with whatever is nearest the street.

IT'S news TO ME!

SEVEN KEYS TO Cape Cod

ONE day we found we owned a field on Cape Cod. It was full of wild roses in the summer and blue asters in the fall and bay-berry all the time! The ocean lapped our eastern boundary and there was nothing between us and Spain. But we had no house!

New Yorkers Do Garden

WHEN people find that my home is in Greenwich Village, I have to reply again and again to the question:

Biennials Stage the Greatest Show of All

OFTEN when I suggest foxgloves, Canterbury-bells, or some other grand biennial as just about the last word in floriferous beauty, my garden consultant says, "Oh, they're so much trouble. It takes a year to get them ready to bloom and they're all over in a few weeks-- poof, just like that!"

Cool Little Touches

WHEN friends drop in on a blistering hot day it's flattering to watch them sink down into one of your chairs with sighs of relief and gratefully exclaim, "How heavenly cool you keep it!" Of course, you know very well it's not a bit cooler in your house than in theirs. It's simply that you've gained a cool, refreshing air by little touches here and there.

It's More Fun to Play at Home

IF YOU'RE a gadder-about who seldom stays at home long enough to enjoy it, or if you believe summer isn't made for outdoor living and outdoor playing-- don't listen.

Indoor GARDENING GUIDE

Outdoor GARDENING GUIDE

JULY brings on trouble Noah never had-- drouth. And there are a few things you ought to know about combating drouth. If, for example, you live in last year's storm area and have a large, newly transplanted or replanted tree, and it's suffering from drouth, you can likely save it by tying a revolving sprinkler in the top to keep the leaves moist and the air cooled.

Problems Solved!

ON THE surface of things, a house is a house with only so many cubic feet of space in it, and the only way to get four bedrooms in a three-bedroom house is to make the bedrooms smaller or the house bigger. But that's only the way it is on the surface.

Cook Hot, Keep Cool

HERE comes July, and by now you're either just a trickle of your former self-- what with 100 in the shade and your outrageous family still demanding three squares a day-- or you're a very smart lady, all cool and contained, with practically every meal gone appliance-minded!

Down With Chaperons! AND UP WITH PARENTAL GUIDANCE

BETTER HOMES & GARDENS' readers vote for parental guidance of high-school dating, but say, "No chaperons!"

Men Voted It "Tops" FOR SUMMER DINING

"JELLIED HAM LOAF is the winnah!" That was the unanimous chorus of a crew of visiting males who invaded the Tasting-Test Kitchen just as the judging of the Contest for Warm-Weather Meats and Summer Jams and Conserves was completed.

"Meat--All Summer Long"

The Man Next Door

You might have thought they had struck oil in the garden across the street yesterday, from all the excitement. It turned out to be the first blossom on a new rosebush.

Article

Agreeable House

Guess Where

Article

How to Mix Periods

It Took Imagination

FROM Ugly Duckling to Princess was hardly a greater change than that wrought by the Irwin Wheelers on their old house on Trinity Lake, New York.

Fluffy Pies and Such

Are Yon Remodeling This Year?

Amateurs' Delphinium Calendar

WITH a little care at the right time, delphiniums will top everything in your garden. This calendar tells when to do what to them, and why. There isn't space to go into the wonderful new varieties-- the big blues that grow 7 feet high with 3-foot flower spikes; the snowy whites; the brand-new delicate pinks-- but you'll read all about them in catalogs. You can read, too, about the new mildew-resistant strains that are so fine for foggy gardens...

Along the Garden Path

IF YOU CAN'T KEEP fresh sod or grass seed from washing out on a sloping bank, get some of these potato or onion sacks woven of paper fiber; peg them down over the new sod or seeding. They'll hold it in place.-- Lula Egan Quinlan, Okla.