EVERGREENS FOR PROFIT. 19 



an evergreen roof over your stock. Your hay barn and racks can 

 be put in the center of the lot, just a movable roof is all that 

 will be needed for the hay as your growing trees will shelter It 

 from the driving rains. This enclosure should be cleaned out 

 and plowed every spring, and perhaps sowed to something which 

 ■could be used for fodder. Here you have a building which is 

 alive, growing better all the while. It has cost but little. Tou 

 •do not have to insure it and after 15 years, when a lumber bam 

 begins to show age, your evergreen barn will be a beauty, and 

 it would take several hundred dollars to buy it. Ten dollars 

 would be all the frame would cost, and it will put on the sides 

 and do the shingling Itself. 



The Wind Break. — I have noted in those years when the hot 

 winds raged that while whole fields of corn in the open were 

 burned up in August, those places sheltered by trees or bluffs 

 produced good crops. It is well known that heavy windstorms 

 often injure and lodge thegrain. Suppose in the North you have 

 a. hedge row of White Spruce, and further South the Ponderosa. 

 When once established they grow about two feet a year. Think 

 of the beauty of a farm thus enclosed, with these staunch de- 

 fenders, growing taller and stronger every year. They would 

 soon be so large as to bafHe the winds. It is well known that 

 in a hot, drying wind, raging at the rate of thirty miles an hour, 

 the evaporation is six times as great as during a calm. So we 

 must devise some way to encourage the calm and discourage the 

 wind. 



Here then are your groves, shelter belts and evergreen 

 enclosures. Each year gives you greater protection and comfort 

 till it seems as if your northern home was moved several hun- 

 dred miles to the South. 



