AGRICULTURE IN OUR RURAL SCHOOLS. 255 



with home economics, to turn a portion of their attention to the 

 rural school. They will be able to give us the reading books, the 

 charts, the remodeled text books and the outlines for experiments 

 and observation exercises which are needed. 



The trained rural school teachers have an abundance of inter- 

 esting material for nature study near at hand. They have the farm- 

 ers' homes, the fields, gardens, school grounds, lanes and woods. 

 If we will only educate teachers how to use their eyes and give them 

 some helps so that they can teach their pupils interesting facts, thev 

 can start the country boy and girl on the road to an appreciation 

 of the beauty of the country, the interests of the farm and the joys 

 and duties of home making. We have much material that we can 

 put into the school room. Here I have some samples of drawings 

 of wheat and other field crops (exhibiting) which show how the 

 fiowers are constructed and how their fertilization takes place. There 

 are no better subjects for half of this instruction than the crops of 

 the field, of the garden and of the forest. Charts and reading les- 

 sons could be made dealing with the plants, domestic and wild 

 animals, the farm and grounds, the buildings and the home. 



The Minnesota Experiment Station has made some experiments 

 along a line of interest in this connection. We have devised and 

 used plans of gardens suited to the country school grounds. These 

 gardens have been so easily and successfully managed at the experi- 

 ment station that we are greatly encouraged that many schools can 

 adopt the idea. People are apt to think of the merely interesting 

 things, the matters relating to pure science, and the fancy things, 

 but we can put in these gardens much that is practical as well as 

 interesting. For example, we wish to show that some simple experi- 

 ments could be carried on with field crops and even with farm man- 

 agement. We have succeeded in using fields only eight or ten feet 

 square, showing the operation of a farm with its systems of rota- 

 tion. The school of agriculture has found that the students do not 

 take readily to the practice of systematic farm rotations. They have 

 so long learned farming without system, that system in the manage- 

 ment of fields seemed to them unnatural. But in these small gar- 

 dens the principle of crop rotations is shown in a very practical way. 

 A rural school garden forty feet square can be made to serve many 

 useful purposes. In addition to the very small fields of the ordinary 

 grain, forage and root crops, small plots and rows of garden veget- 

 ables and annual flowers should be in such gardens. Beside this 

 there is room for a number of perennial and annual plants, giving to 

 each an area two or three feet square. 



