CAN WE MAKE IT PAY? 267 



arrange your planting so as to keep up a succession 

 of fruit ripening through the whole year. You could 

 not handle a crop of five hundred bushels of straw- 

 berries without a good deal of hired help, but one 

 hundred bushels of currants, succeeded by one hun- 

 dred bushels of berries, and these by plums and other 

 fruits, while they keep you busy, do not involve you 

 in very heavy expenses. 



I have, however, a good deal of sympathy with 

 those who prefer to start their country experience 

 with poultry raising. The price of eggs is not likely 

 to fall below thirty cents in the winter and twenty 

 in the summer. The market is always sure, and it 

 does not vary greatly in different parts of the 

 country. Only you must have a cheap home food, 

 or the hens will not only take your table waste and 

 steal your small fruits, but they will run up a mill 

 bill, destroying everything and yet not satisfied, nor 

 laying enough to make it pay. At any rate let 

 this matter be well thought out and a good propor- 

 tion established between cost of keeping and income 

 from eggs and broilers. 



Be sure also to have good poultry fences between 

 yourself and your neighbors. A little management 

 will give a good wide range for your hens, where 

 they will keep lawns and vegetable gardens cleared 

 of crickets and grasshoppers, curculios and other 

 noxious bugs, while excluded from the gooseberries 

 and the strawberries. It is a much easier problem 

 in the South, where biddy can range the fields twelve 



