SPRING OF '97 223 



straw was rather short, and the corn did very 

 well indeed, due largely to thorough cultiva- 

 tion. Twelve acres of oats were cut for forage, 

 and the rest yielded 33 bushels to the acre, a 

 little over 1300 bushels. 



The alfalfa and timothy made a good start. 

 From the former we cut, late in June, 21 tons 

 to the acre, and from the timothy, in July, 21 

 tons, 50 tons of timothy and 45 of alfalfa. 

 Each of these fields received the usual top-dress-- 

 ing after the crop was cut ; but the timothy did 

 not respond, the late season was too dry. We 

 cut two more crops from the alfalfa field, which 

 together made a yield of a little more than 2 

 tons. The alfalfa in that dry summer gave me 

 95 tons of good hay, proving its superiority as a 

 dry-weather crop. 



Johnson started the one-and-one-half-acre vege- 

 table and fruit garden in April, and devoted much 

 of his time to it. His primitive hotbeds gradu- 

 ally emptied themselves into the garden, and we 

 now began to taste the fruit of our own soil, 

 much to the pleasure of the whole colony. It 

 is surprising what a real gardener can do with a 

 garden of this size. By feeding soil and plants 

 liberally, he is able to keep the ground producing 

 successive crops of vegetables, from the day the 

 frost leaves it in the spring until it again takes 

 possession in the fall, without doing any wrong 

 to the land. Indeed, our garden grows better 

 and more prolific each year in spite of the im- 



