SPRING OF ’97 223 
straw was rather short, and the corn did very 
well indeed, —due largely to thorough cultiva- 
tion. Twelve acres of oats were cut for forage, 
and the rest yielded 33 bushels to the acre, —a 
little over 1300 bushels. 
The alfalfa and timothy made a good start. 
From the former we cut, late in June, 2} tons 
to the acre, and from the timothy, in July, 24 
tons, — 50 tons of timothy and 45 of alfalfa. 
Each of these fields received the usual top-dress- 
ing after the crop was cut; but the timothy did 
not respond, — the late season was too dry. We 
cut two more crops from the alfalfa field, which 
together made a yield of a little more than 2 
tons. The alfalfa in that dry summer gave me 
95 tons of good hay, proving its superiority as a 
dry-weather crop. 
Johnson started the one-and-one-half-acre vege- 
table and fruit garden in April, and devoted much 
of his time to it. His primitive hotbeds gradu- 
ally emptied themselves into the garden, and we 
now began to taste the fruit of our own soil, 
much to the pleasure of the whole colony. It 
is surprising what a real gardener can do with a 
garden of this size. By feeding soil and plants 
liberally, he is able to keep the ground producing 
successive crops of vegetables, from the day the 
frost leaves it in the spring until it again takes 
possession in the fall, without doing any wrong 
to the land. Indeed, our garden grows better 
and more prolific each year in spite of the im- 
