324 Singing Valleys 



that would be ready for market ten days or one week before 

 the other farmers had roasting ears to sell. Before-season vege- 

 tables were worth money. Luther Burbank worked out a 

 scheme of starting his sweet corn in flats filled with fresh 

 stable manure and leaf mold. When the seeds had ger- 

 minated, and the roots were three or four inches long and 

 the green shoots about one inch, he dropped them into the 

 drills in the garden, and covered them over with half an inch 

 of earth. Other farmers said you couldn't grow corn that 

 way. But young Burbank's corn grew. Moreover, he did not 

 have to pay particular attention to which way the germinated 

 seed fell into the drill. The corn could take care of itself. 

 Those seeds just wriggled around under ground, got their 

 roots under them and their shoots on top and started to grow. 

 Many of them were up and out of the ground within twenty- 

 four hours of the planting. Luther Burbank was able to snap 

 off hundreds of ears, load them on a spring wagon and drive 

 them to the market in Fitchburg two weeks before his neigh- 

 bors had corn to sell. In this way he could get fifty cents per 

 dozen for the ears. Two weeks later sweet corn would sell at 

 twenty-five cents per dozen ears. 



It was in his effort to develop a variety of sweet corn which 

 would stand earlier planting than most of the sweet corns 

 could and which would mature quickly that started Luther 

 Burbank thinking about a yellow variety. He made several ex- 

 periments, but these were interrupted by his moving to Cali- 

 fornia in 1875. 



Meanwhile, back in Greenfield, Massachusetts, a man 

 named William Chambers was thinking along the same lines. 

 Chambers was one of those amateur gardeners who are al- 

 ways trying experiments. "Green messing" his women folks 

 called his puttering around the garden. They were impatient 

 of his experiments, such as grafting a peach cion onto an apple 

 to see what Nature would make of such a marriage. "Trying to 

 improve on what God, in the first chapter of Genesis, said 

 was already perfect." 



