Master Thomas Weeks when a baby in the first 

 brooder built in California 



weight in making the decision, but she promised. Little did we then 

 know of the toil, concentration and application it took to evolve a 

 home that would approach our dreams; neither did we then realize 

 that the keenest joys of life come with the making of this dream home. 



It was a crucial moment when I found that I had spent the $875 

 cash and was down to my last dollar. My future wife was due to arrive 

 March 10th and I was broke. I was a stranger in a strange land and 

 in a very strange and uncomfortable condition. I explained my 

 predicament to the man from whom I had purchased the land and 

 begged a loan of $25 to carry me over the wedding day until I could 

 get work. To make the story short, I got the $25, married the girl 

 and went to work. It is needless to go into details telling of the many 

 kinds of work I had to do to make ends meet. I thought I never would 

 get that $25 paid back, and I think the man became uneasy himself. 

 Mine was the common story of many who buy too much land and have 

 too little capital left to work with. I did not know that it was possible 

 to make a better living with less work on one acre than I was doing 

 on ten. 



I shall hurry through the long list of experiments that has led me up 

 to the system which I am now using. Our first eggs were from a fine 

 flock of white Leghorns from a near neighbor, and as these were two 

 and three years old and had not been forced for eggs the chicks were 

 first class. We brought out a medium hatch from our home-made 

 incubator and raised a fine percentage in the big cold brooder house 

 underneath our flat. Then I built a long laying house for the 400 

 pullets raised this year. This long house had a scratching shed under- 

 neath and roosting compartment above. It was a cumbersome affair 

 and entirely impractical for poultry. The hens run at large in the 

 ten-acre orchard of young peach trees. They did moderately well at 

 egg production this first year. But I had too many hens together and 

 ventilation was wrong, and that first winter some had colds and I 

 became dissatisfied with the house. Next year I built portable canvas 

 poultry houses and scattered them through the orchard. These 



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