ABOUT FRUITS, FLOWERS AND FARMING. 225 



FIELD ROOT CROPS 



FROM mid- winter, and especially just before spring opens, 

 beets, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, ruta baga, and mangel 

 wurtzel are of the highest utility. After months of dry 

 fodder, and of sloops thickened with corn-meal, cattle need 

 their stomach, their blood need a change of diet ; and none 

 can be better than roots. At the East it is no longer a de- 

 batable question root crops are as regularly laid in as 

 grain or grass crops. The chief difficulty at the East, in 

 introducing "new-fangled notions," arises from the regular 

 routine habits of farmers and their settled aversion to change 

 from old ways. Very little of this spirit exists at the West. 

 Tlu- re the very essence of life is change. The population 

 have broken up from old homesteads, moved off from old 

 States, abandoned the comforts and settled life of long 

 tilled agricultural districts to come into a new country, 

 where they have to practise new ways, live differently, and 

 labor by new methods ; and, by consequence, the farming 

 community of the West are remarkably free to meet and 

 adopt agricultural improvements. But the difficulty lies in 

 a different direction. The farmers have large farms are 

 ambitious of large crops, large herds of cattle, large droves 

 of hogs, and of a style of husbandry which brings in a 

 large pile, and all at once ; so that the idea of good farming 

 is large farming. Many a sturdy Kentuckian will very 

 patiently plow, two or three times, his fifty or hundred acres 

 of corn, and think nothing of it ; but to put in half an acre 

 of carrots, or beets, to weed and work, to harvest and store 

 the vexatious little crop, this seems a piddling business. 

 Our big prairie farmers, our heavy bottom-land fanners, our 

 stock farmers who " hog" one or two hundred acres of corn, 

 of their own planting or of their neighbor's, they do not 

 love little work. We know a man who lives on thirty acres 

 of land of about a middling quality. lie winters seven 

 cows, two horses, and two pi.^s. Ho raises corn and grasa 



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