1906. 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER 
373 
Hope Farm Notes 
All Sorts.—I am still “camping out,” 
as the other little girl has taken the dis¬ 
ease. We make ourselves as comfortable 
as possible in the old house, and hope for 
an end of the siege. The boy and I are 
getting a good many plants started ahead. 
We have over 400 potato pieces planted in 
boxes for transplanting later. As our 
soil is naturally cold and heavy we can¬ 
not plant outdoors as early as we would 
like. When the potato plants are about 
three inches above ground we shall carry 
the boxes out, dig out the sets with as 
much soil as possible around them, and 
plant them about an inch deeper than they 
stood in the box. A stake will be set at 
each hill and the plant tied up to it. as is 
often done with tomatoes. This will give 
us earlier potatoes and enable us to give 
very clean culture, for we shall plant them 
where we are to make a lawn in the Fall. 
We are also starting melons and Lima 
beans on pieces of sod to be put out in the 
field later. Usually we do not gain much 
by doing this, but in a wet season it pays 
—on our heavy soil. ... I stated a 
few weeks since that the Alfalfa seemed 
to be all on top of the ground. I thought 
the frost had lifted it out for good. Now 
I am surprised to find the field a mass of 
green, darker and thicker than the rye. 
Strange to say, the best part of it is in a 
low, damp place where the water stood for 
days. It is hard to account for such 
things, but if ever there was a welcome 
Spring visitor at Hope Farm it is this 
healthy Alfalfa. I realize more and more 
each year what it would mean for us to 
have five acres of that crop. It would 
very nearly provide for our stock, and let 
us have the grass on the hills for mulch¬ 
ing. . . . Our first plowing was done 
on April 11, over two weeks in advance 
of last year. There is one strip of light 
ground which dries off early. Last year 
we had early peas on it, then sweet corn 
with turnips in the corn. Many of the 
turnips lived all through this mild Win¬ 
ter and in March we gave it a good coat 
of manure. As a result the plow tumbled 
the soil over crumbly and fine, and it was 
harrowed down with the Acme harrow at 
once. My experience is that turnips, 
especially the Cow-horn variety, improve 
the soil far beyond what we might expect 
from the actual plant food they contain. 
They always leave the soil mellow and 
open. It plows vyejl and does not cake. 
We shall probably repeat last year’s crop¬ 
ping on this piece, first peas in drills three 
feet apart—separate plantings every week. 
They will be kept well cultivated and after 
May 20 sweet corn will be planted midway 
between the rows of peas. The vines will 
be either pulled after picking or plowed 
under. The cultivator will be kept go.ing 
until early August, when turnips and 
Crimson clover seed will be scattered 
ahead of the cultivator and raked in. 
. . . As I write the prospect for a fruit 
crop is excellent; the older peach trees are 
white with buds, just ready to burst into 
bloom. One block of two-year-old Car¬ 
man trees is a wonder. These trees are 
on a rocky ledge with barely 18 inches of 
soil. They have never been cultivated, 
but weeds from the strawberries were 
piled around them during the Summer. I 
have learned more about handling a peach 
tree from that small block than from all 
the books I ever read. . . . The labor 
question troubles us a little. Seymour has 
left us, and at present we are blocking out 
what we can do well with our own fam¬ 
ily. Mother helps by driving the Acme 
harrow and Cutaway—a few hours at a 
time. She likes to do this, and the exer¬ 
cise helps her. Lyon hopes to go to the 
Mt. Hertnon school in May. so he is put¬ 
ting in April on the farm to help us start. 
I would like to get a stout man and his 
wife, but this disease puts us back. In 
some places where we planned to grow 
cultivated crops we shall seed down to 
oats and peas or sorghum for fodder. If 
we get more help later we can plow the 
stubble for late cabbage or cow peas. Our 
best work will be done among the trees, 
for we all see now that helping the or¬ 
chard is building for the future. The boy 
gets two cents for each dead chicken or 
small animal he buries near a trep, 10 
cents a bushel for bones and 15 cents for 
hauling a load of chicken manure and 
scattering around the peach trees on the 
hill. Among the first principles of farm¬ 
ing at Hope Farm are the following: 
“Never burn anything that zvill rot around 
a tree! Never waste any fertilising mat¬ 
ter—gut it near a tree or plant!” . . . 
Faster Sunday opened with a regular 
deluge of rain. It was rough on the peo¬ 
ple who take this day for displaying their 
good clothes, but we are all wearing our 
old ones at Hope Farm, and there was 
nothing to spoil. Jack sings in the choir, 
and he drove off through tiie flood to lend 
his voice to the service. The disease kept 
the rest of us at home. On Saturday 
night I ^brought out an Easter lily in a 
pot for the little sick girls. They thought 
it was lovely, but they remembered a lit¬ 
tle friend who is much worse off than 
they are, and they wanted to send the lily 
to her. Of course I agreed, and so Jack 
carried it with him Sunday morning, and 
the Hope Farm prisoners and outcasts 
watched the Easter rain without adding 
any tears to it. We had no fine plumage 
to spoil. We couldn’t help it, and the 
water was doing wonders for the grass 
and trees. 
I would like to go through life without 
a lawsuit if I could. It is the part of a 
good citizen to obey the law. That is 
why I am now occupying the old stone 
house, looking across to the new house 
and remembering how, some years ago, 1 
was foolish enough to attempt to sing 
out loud, “Thou art so near and yet so 
far!” The doctor said that it was per¬ 
fectly safe for me to stay downstairs in 
the other house, but in order to satisfy 
the Board of Health and thus let them 
satisfy public sentiment, here I am! 1 
believe that the best way to make a just 
law strong or a foolish law ridiculous is 
to enforce it. Now what I’m getting at 
is this. Over the wall from one of my 
young orchards is a block of apple trees 
simply plastered with the scale. It is a 
menace to the entire neighborhood. The 
place is not occupied, and there is some 
question about the ownership. We have 
a law in New Jersey which authorizes the 
State Entomologist to clean out such 
places, but in this case of questionable 
ownership it is doubtful if this law will 
give us the right to proceed in the usual 
way. If I could locate the owner I would 
bring suit in order to protect the neigh¬ 
borhood—as it is this block of trees is the 
greatest nuisance we have in sight. • . 
I had a chicken killed for me the other day 
and in dressing it found one of its legs was 
bigger than it really ought to he—in fact 
nearly twice the size of the other. The hen 
was in first-class condition in other ways, as 
far as I could judge, and was full of eggs of 
all sizes. Some nearly ready to he laid. Of 
course I did not cook the chicken, as I have a 
horror of anything not all right, hut would 
it have been fit to eat? G. 
Canada 
I imagine the flesh of that hen was 
perfectly good, yet I should feel just as 
you did about eating it. No doubt the 
injury which caused the big leg was done 
while the hen was small, and the system 
had recovered from the shock—yet I for 
one have no wish to eat the meat of 
“abnormal specimens.” That is one line 
in which a farmer has a great advantage. 
When a city man eats a chicken which 
has been shipped and handled and frozen 
and thawed he gets a strange and wonder¬ 
ful specimen. It is a good thing for him 
that the heat of cooking destroys most 
germs! 
In common with the country at large our 
greatest trouble is the “help problem.” I 
have solved it to my own satisfaction; just 
simply don't have any. I milk 20 cows, make 
butter, buy all my feed, sell my own butter, 
and let some one else struggle with the labor 
question. Not much money in it, neither 
much worry. B. W. B. 
Colorado. ■ 
It will strike some of our people as 
strange that a Colorado man has found 
it necessary to solve the labor problem in 
this way. For some, it Is the most sen¬ 
sible thing to do. We shall have to re¬ 
organize our plans, cut out some crops 
and stock and try to do the best we can 
with the help in our own family and what 
we can get as day labor. It comes hard 
for some farmers to change their plans 
and seed down cultivated fields, but it 
may be more profitable. I know of cases 
where farmers have been carrying a rota¬ 
tion of potatoes, corn, grain and grass. 
They are now planning to get the whole 
farm into clover and pasture and run 
hogs, beef cattle and sheep through the 
Summer. This will hurt their feelings 
at first, but it will pay better than the old 
plan without good help. As is well known, 
my own plan is to turn my hill land into 
an orchard, with the least possible de¬ 
pendence upon hired help. h. w. c. 
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