112 Junior Naturalist Work. 



" The source is a spring. The bed is mostly smooth rock, too slippery to 

 stand on. In lots of places the bank is steep and rocky with water trickling 

 down the rocks. 



" The trees near the brook arc hemlock, beach, birch and maple. In one 

 place a hemlock grew out ov&r the water. It is dead now and another has 

 grown out over the first. 



" I have seen minnows in this brook and little water flies darting back and 

 fort^ii in the water. 



" What I have written so far is about the brook in summer when the 

 water is lowest. Now I will tell what I have seen in time of a flood. 



" The water was muddy and roaring, at least four times as high as it 

 usually is. It came over the road and washed one bridge away. The rain 

 of a night and a day caused this. 



" There is a lovely ravine that we drive through often. The road follows 

 the brook for half a mile with the brook on one side of the road. A steep 

 hill on the other side of the brook is covered with trees, shrubs and berry 

 bushes. These hills are so steep and high that the sun only gets in at noon. 

 There are several springs in this ravine, one of them a small one at the 

 base of the rocks near the road where mamma used to drink when she was 

 a little girl and went to school in the ' little white schoolhouse ' at the other 

 end of the ravine. 



'■ Swift Brook empties into the Chenango River two miles south of 

 Norwich. 



"HELEN BURR." 



6. Pri.':c for best letter on the potato. 



" The farm crop that interested me more than any other is potatoes. We 

 planted eighteen acres. 



" When the frost went out of the ground, we plowed the rest of the ground 

 that we did not have time to plow in the fall. We dragged the ground 

 three or four times. We marked the ground up and down the hill first. 

 Then we marked the ground crossways. We dropped the potatoes from two 

 and one half to three feet apart. We did not cut much seed. A man and 

 two horses followed the man who dropped the seed and covered the potatoes. 

 We had a few above the ground when the frost came. We recovered them. 

 We started to cultivate cur potatoes as soon as they became big enough so 

 that we could see them. It rained almost all the time. When they got big 

 enough we took the shovel plows and killed all the weeds that were in the 

 hills. We went over them with a hillcr killing all the weeds that the shovel 

 plows did not kill. 



" We began to spray potatoes July fiftli. We sprayed until August twenty- 

 first. Tlie vines were almost dead by September first. We used three 

 gallons of blue vitrol, seven pounds of lime, one quart of arsenic and salsoda 

 to kill the bugs to fifty gallons of water. We commenced digging September 

 twenty-first. The potatoes go from one hundred fifty to one hundred sevent^'- 

 five bushels to the acre. 



"DONALD TOX." 



