Ten Thousand a Year 247 



neighbors considered spraying superfluous. But it 

 was not the spraying that was his sole protection. 

 ^'Feed the bugs too, *' he would say, and enriching 

 his soil, he fed the vines so bountifully they could 

 be attacked by the pests and yet not seriously 

 suffer. 



His orchards were like his vineyards — small in 

 area but intensively productive. When his neigh- 

 bors were picking two bushels from the cherry tree, 

 he was picking five; so his cherry orchard of ten 

 acres was equivalent to twenty-five of his neigh- 

 bors, and his peach orchard of eight acres equaled 

 their twenty. His prune orchard of eight acres 

 surpassed any other of four times the acreage in the 

 Valley. It was wholly a matter of intensive farm- 

 ing. '*If the land gives me six himdred dollars an 

 acre, I guess I can afford to put a little back, ** he 

 said, and would expend seventy-five dollars an 

 acre without hesitation in fertilizer. He had quite 

 old-fashioned notions, however, about fertilizers 

 and called the commercial ones "patent peaches. " 

 So the cars of barnyard manure which he managed 

 to bring in from city stockyards — a very long 

 train they would make in a year — ^were of what he 

 called *'the real thing,** but I noticed that he 

 mixed "the real thing *' with many a ton of "patent 

 peaches.** Neville was always hauling fertilizers 

 and covering the land, though he never allowed the 

 cover to remain long above ground. "The wind is 

 a thief and the sun is always stealing,** was his 

 comment ; so he plowed in his fertilizers as soon as 



