DEFEAT BY THE INSECT TRUST 57 



elderberries, red, yellow and black raspberries, or black caps, and bay- 

 berries, from which we make the Christmas "bayberrie dyppe." Our 

 only bog was planted to cranberries from stock sent us from Cape 

 Cod. 



Tie and Pole Forestry. 



We found the care and propagation of trees as outlined by the 

 United States Government interesting, and the farm library was 

 added to by forestry papers and booklets as well as Governmental 

 maps showing the topography and boundaries of our State and 

 country. As a business project, in view of the dearth and high 

 price of the wood of black walnut and cherry, we planted hundreds 

 of small trees of each in the pasture land, roughly railing them from 

 cattle. Someone, sometime, should reap bountifully where we sowed. 



An acquaintance owning an extensive estate edging one of 

 our railroad lines has set out twenty thousand or more locusts and 

 chestnuts close to the track, a pole and tie proposition, but unless 

 disease in the chestnut is conquered, that end of the project is 

 wrecked, though the locust must in time yield good returns, for who 

 or what could injure a locust? 



Ornamental trees on the farm were few compared with the five 

 hundred and more species indigenous to this country and included 

 chestnut, hickory, sassafras, tulip, swamp oak, maple, aromatic black 

 birch and sycamore. In shrubs there were half a dozen lilacs and a 

 couple of spireas, one of which had a magnificent golden leaf in early 

 spring, but lost its coloring later in the season, as do the ordinary 

 copper beeches. 



Defeat by the Insect Trust. 



In the six acre blackberry patch was lost a mighty battle. We 

 controlled at first the spring and fall orange rust that in a year 

 or two made heavy inroads on this crop, while the peach 

 and quince borers found death at the end of a wire which, spite of 

 soiled clothing and bruised knees, was pressed into his hiding places, 

 usually found where the trunk edged the ground or an inch or two 

 below the surface. By like method was searched out and destroyed 

 the apple borer in his bark-hidden lair. 



The asparagus beetle, the raspberry borer, and cane girdler, the 

 potato bug in fact, all the various enemies of the farmer that flew, 

 crawled, or bored we fought tooth and nail with Paris green, helle- 

 bore, Bordeaux mixture, and other insect and fungi destroyers. 



Purification by Fire. 



Purification by fire saved foliage, bloom, fruit, and plant, whether 

 it was currant worm, rose bug, or infected wood of pear or peach or 

 vine of raspberry, blackberry, and grape that fed the holocaust 

 and when our twenty years of apprenticeship at farming ended- 



