DRY-FARMING CONGRESS, WICHITA, 1914 



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as any plant can and live, and it evaporates just as little moisture as any 

 plant can, and live. That furnishes a hint to most any man who is plant- 

 ing trees in this Great Plains region — to plant trees that need the least 

 moisture. Plums, cherries, etc., are good ones to plant. I have never yet 

 found any species of currants that could fight its way through so well as 

 the black currant. 



The results these plants give are the results we ought to work on in 

 figuring in this home-making horticulture that is the kind of horticulture 

 I think we need in this dry-land region. 



This talk is not meant for the man who lives in the creek botom where 

 he can grow anything. It is meant for the dry-land man — the man who, 

 when he plants trees, is going to utilize the space between the trees for 

 some garden. The garden should be made ready the fall before. Prep- 

 aration is what counts. A man cannot say, "I cannot fall plow here." He 

 will have to cover the ground and mulch it, etc., then rake it off in the 

 spring, put a windbreak around it, etc. He has no time to wait for anyone 

 to make the ground ready. He has to make it right himself. The stuff is 

 there but it takes a mixture of time and brains to make that soil grow 

 varieties. The varieties that are succeeding all over Kansas and western 

 Oklahoma, if you get them in the right place, like the red cedar, reduce 

 their evaporation to the minimum. They do not blossom too early in the 

 spring and they do not have their leaves out too late in the fall. For in- 

 stance, the principal trees a man should try to raise are Winesap and 

 Maiden Blush apples, Early Richmond cherries, black currants for Jelly, and 

 some of the plums that have been so successfully raised. If he has these, 

 he has a proposition that is going to furnish him pie material, and what 

 every farm home needs more than anything else, perhaps, is pie! Of 

 course, I am not intimating that the Kansas homes are short on pie, even 

 though they do not have the trees, but you cannot make homes out of the 

 canning factory. 



A permanent home proposition is what we need. When the family 

 leaves the farm and moves to town to educate the children, leaving the land 

 in charge of a renter, the land goes down and down, and so this permanent 

 home proposition is what we must have if we make it anything like a 

 success. 



For you men who come from the Dakotas and from Colorado, there is 

 no reason why, if we start the pine early, it is not perhaps a better tree 

 in general landscape effect and general appearance, and at the Hays 

 Station, it is equal to the cedar in every point except one. That is hail, 

 which has cut more hopes in two and pounded them down into the ground 

 than any other factor we have. The red cedar, if cut down, with only one 

 little leaf left, will come out the next season. The pine is next in this 

 respect. It took the other trees a year to get over the hail. One of the 

 things we are trying to do in our state is to propagate the red cedar. It 

 is a long, slow process. Some of this seed will start the first year, some 

 the second and a little more the third. 



The windbreak and the pond or the irrigation pump are essential, 



