HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 253 



tions to the great fixed laws. It's so easy in 

 farming to settle into habits of thinking and 

 practice, even though one prides himself that 

 he's a progressive of the progressives. After 

 a while it becomes hard to say what is the real 

 thing and what the counterfeit of good 

 methods. 



We've made a few mistakes by taking up 

 what we thought to be advanced methods and 

 persisting in them when we might better have 

 let Nature have her own way. Hers is almost 

 certainly a more deliberate way than ours; 

 but that's most likely to be its chief virtue. 



There's the matter of artificial fertilizer, for 

 instance. With a soil so impoverished as ours 

 was, we knew it would be a matter of years 

 to bring it to normal producing power if we 

 stuck to the natural way of returning our crops 

 to the land through stock feeding. It seemed 

 vastly easier and certainly quicker to doctor 

 the soil, giving it at once the elements it lacked 

 and so stimulating it to immediate perform- 

 ance. Soil chemistry, if you get just a smat- 

 tering of it, seems an imposingly exact science. 

 You get an analysis or what's called a normal 

 soil; then you find out that your own is shy 

 about so much potash, and so much phosphoric 



