HAMPDEN SOCIETY. 41 



grow where one only grew before, is a benefactor to his race • 

 none the less so is he, who plants a fruit tree where there was 

 none, or who renovates a worthless tree by giving it a new top 

 of good fruit. 



The farmers, in this vicinity, have yet to learn that the rais- 

 ing of fruit and vegetables is the most profitable employment of 

 the husbandman. A good-sized apple tree of choice fruit will 

 frequently produce more profit than an acre of corn, or rye, or 

 oats, and every tree on any farm that is sound and thrifty, may, 

 by ingrafting, in half-a-dozen years, be made to yield good 

 crops of valuable fruit. 



An acre of land, planted with strawberries, will yield the 

 farmer as much profit as ten acres of corn ; and strawberries 

 are as easily raised as corn, are as certain a crop, and always 

 find a ready market at favorable prices. An acre of land 

 planted to cranberries will yield more profit even than straw- 

 berries, and are always in great demand at a good price. 

 Onions are another crop which are profitable to raise to supply 

 the market. It is as easy to get 500 bushels of onions on an 

 acre of land as to get 200 bushels of potatoes, or 50 bushels of 

 corn. Carrots and beets are also profitable crops for the farmer, 

 and will aid him exceedingly in fattening his cattle and feeding 

 his stock. The lands in the Connecticut valley are of the right 

 sort to raise these roots — deep and rich loam, and free from 

 stones. It should be the established rule of every cultivator to 

 have no indifferent fruit. It requires little or no more care to 

 raise a Baldwin, a Greening, or Russet apple tree, than it does 

 an insignificant seedling, — the fruit of one worth from 50 cents 

 to $1 a bushel for winter, the other from 8 to 12 cents for vine- 

 gar, or to feed stock. Recent experiments go to show, that, by 

 suitable culture, trees that are barren every other year may be 

 made to produce good crops annually ; that there is no more 

 necessity of trees being barren half the time, than there is of 

 land lying fallow half the time to recruit : both may be made to 

 produce good annual crops, if suitably enriched. 



Mr. Pell, a great apple cultivator on the banks of the Hudson 

 River, in a letter to the Commissioner of Patents, at Washington, 

 says in substance : — •' For some years, I have been experimenting 

 6 



