1910 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



201 



Our Homes 



By a. I. Root. 



The voice of one crying in the wilderness.— JOHN 

 1:23. 



Whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, 

 and whose glory is their shame.— Philippians 3 : 19. 



Some of you may be tempted to think me 

 irreverent, dear frien is, when I tell you I 

 have lontr felt that Terry, Fletcher, Sinclair, 

 and perhaps a few others, were in some re- 

 spects like John the Baptist who kept up his 

 "crying in the wilderness" until the sinful 

 world not only stopped to listen but came to 

 him from "all the region round about," 

 asking what they must do to be saved. Of 

 course, John's message was to a sm/u/ world, 

 while T. B Terry's is mainly to a suffering 

 world; but sin and suffering are so closely 

 connpcted it may be hard to separate them. 



I suppose the readers of Gleanings have 

 all read the matter on the bick cover of this 

 journal for Jan. 15. If you have not, I beg 

 of you to get it and r^^ad it at once. Of 

 course, it is anadvertisemp>nt; but after hav- 

 ing read it over several times I decide again 

 it contains a story of more real v^ilue to hu- 

 manity than any advertisement I ever saA^ 

 before in my life. It was reading this that 

 prompted me to tell you something of what 

 I know of T. B. Terry. 



Years ago, when I first began to be really 

 interested in high pressure agriculture Ter- 

 ry was invited to speak at a farmers' insti- 

 tute in Medina. He gave us a potato talk, 

 and the recital of his experiments and final 

 successes took such a hold of me that I al- 

 most insisted he should at once put it into 

 book form. I need hardly te'l you that this 

 book proved a boon to the farming world. 

 A big moral comes right in here. Terry rais- 

 ed more potatoes, and better ones, because 

 he made potatoes his express business in 

 life. He seemed to recognize in the outset 

 that, ♦^o lead the world in any thing, the en- 

 thusiast must have "elbow room." I won- 

 der if our young bee-keepers (and some of 

 the older ones too) are listening. To make 

 a real success in any thing you want to be 

 untrammeled. People laughed when Terry 

 said he didn't want a chicken or a pig on his 

 premises. I believe he also went so far as 

 to say he didn't want a garden. He said he 

 could make ^is money with potatoes and 

 take this m-^ney and buy his egJS, garden 

 truck, etc., cheaper and easier than to try to 

 grow every thing as so many farmers do. 

 AH the stuff he wanted passed his house 

 every day, and the neighbors were glad to 

 supply him. Well, potatoes must have heavy 

 fertilizing in some shape, and he soon decid- 

 ed clover turned under was the cheapest 

 and best manure, and he therefore bent all 

 his energies toward getting bigger crops of 

 clover than anybody ever saw before. You 

 perhaps know he has given his clover talks 

 at various farmers' institutes all over our 

 land. To make a proper rotation of crops, 

 wheat came in the same way, and he soon 



sold all the wheat he raised in this way, at a 

 big price for seed because it was better and 

 cleaner wheat than could be found in the 

 market. As an illustration, he and his help 

 once spent a whole day in hard picking over 

 his seed wheat in order that he might keep 

 his beautiful farm free from foul weeds. I 

 think they got less than a teacupful of weed 

 seed; but he considered it time well invest- 

 ed. He never used poison on his potatoes, 

 because he hand-picked the mother bugs be- 

 fore they ever had time to lay any eggs, and 

 the work cost him less than the Paris green. 



He did make one digression in favor of 

 strawberries. Something or somebody sug- 

 gested that wonderful berries could be grown 

 by turning under that heavy clover sod; and 

 as an experiment, he, with the aid of his 

 good wife and children, raised more and 

 larger and better berries than were ever 

 seen before in that region. Of course they 

 brought a big price, and he saw at once 

 there was far more money in the berries than 

 in potatoes. Why didn't he start a strawber- 

 ry farm and get ri^h? 



Now, here ia another beautiful moral. Ter- 

 ry's mission in this "wilderness " of sin and 

 suffering was not in order that he might ^e^ 

 rich. I, in one of mv visits, talked the mat- 

 ter over with him. If he went into strawber- 

 ries it would interfere with the education of 

 his children, with his talks at farmers' insti- 

 tutes, with his being of benefit to the world 

 at large, but he did, at my solicitation, write 

 the strawberry book, that has also proved a 

 blessing to humanity. As somebody has said 

 of Prof. Holden, the "corn wizard, "the man 

 who put corn on the witness stand and made 

 it "stand up and answer questions," Terry 

 made potatoes, clover, wheat, strawberries, 

 etc., stand up and answer questions in a way 

 they had never done before since the world 

 began. 



Please pardon me if I refer once more to 

 Booker Washington. When he got to the 

 point where he could thank God that he was 

 born black instead of white he said he was a 

 happy man. I do not know that Terry has 

 ever thanked God that he came so near the 

 verge of the grave, but I think he might do 

 so. Had it not happened, the world would 

 not have had this book. 



Not only did Terry make potatoes, clover, 

 and strawberries "stand up and answer 

 questions," but he did the same thing with 

 his domestic animals; and his book, "The 

 Winter Care of Horses and Cittle," was the 

 outcome of this. The beautiful heavy farm 

 team that carried the immense loads of po- 

 tatoes to market were grown and fed on Ter- 

 ry's clover hay. without a particle of grain. 

 His neighbors said it wasn't hay — it was just 

 "wilted grass and clover." By the way, I 

 wouldn't wonder if the world, at least a part 

 of it, has had better clover hay since Terry's 

 books have been published than they ever 

 had before. Some credit, at least, is due 

 your humble servant for having these books 

 given the world. When "Terry made such a 

 sensation wih his "clover sod" strawber- 

 ries I urged him to put it in book form. He 



