56 WE FARM FOR A HOBBY 



standably, this is the one thing above all others 

 no seedsman or his catalog will discuss. Even to 

 hint that a pound of this or that seed should pro- 

 duce so many pounds of this or that vegetable 

 would open the way for an endless procession of 

 disgruntled litigants. Nevertheless one would sup- 

 pose there might be a semblance of agreement 

 amongst the experts. Yet their guesses of a given 

 crop will vary even under the statisticians' stand- 

 ard alibi: "other things being equal" from three 

 hundred to thirty thousand per cent. 



Of books on agriculture and allied subjects 

 the presses have, ever since Thomas Tusser pub- 

 lished his Five Hundred Points of Husbandry in 

 1557, poured forth an endless torrent. I have man- 

 aged to get this far on a library of twenty-two vol- 

 umes, at least a third of which have been of little 

 use. In technical books the latest is always the best. 

 There is no telling when something revolutionary 

 may turn up. I await impatiently the lowdown on 

 raising vegetables without benefit of soil or sun- 

 light, in chemical solutions; and on insect control 

 by light and sound: two far-reaching contributions 

 to the sum of agricultural knowledge that are still 

 in the laboratory stage. 



Panics and industrial depressions always bring 

 out a flock of back-to-the-land books; most of them 

 highly impractical, the work either of wishful 

 roots-and-berries thinkers or of those enthusiasts 



