394 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER 
May 11, 
not easy to till. This rocky soil, some of it with bowl¬ 
ders just hidden underground that will bring up a 
team “all standing” when the plow strikes- one, or so 
many small stones that if you dig up a shovelful of 
earth the stones among it will weigh twice as much as 
the earth does, makes farm work a far different thing 
from what it is on the soft easily-worked stuneless soil 
of the West. On much of the land it is impossible to 
TYING VINE TO TRELLIS. Fig. 178. 
use modern labor-saving farm tools and machinery, so 
that most of the cleared land is given up to dairying, 
and one of the constant queries of strangers is, “Where 
is your cultivated land?” There is good soil in Con¬ 
necticut (which is the one New England State I am 
acquainted with) and as fine farms as lie outdoors, but 
these are not the ciieap farms that excite the wonder 
of the western farmers. When it comes to producing 
crops, this rocky soil ‘“takes no back seat,” for Con¬ 
necticut leads all the States in the Union in the yield 
per acre of corn, for instance; three bushels per acre 
more than any other State, and 15 bushels more than 
Kansas, the great corn State. (I am copying these figures 
from the United States Year Book of the Department 
of Agriculture, page 659, for 1905; so I suppose they 
are reliable.) Now the farmer’s boy tired of this hard 
labor and seeing his city cousin wearing good clothes 
and earning more money in a week than he can in a 
month, goes to the city to live, and the old folks, with 
hired labor difficult to obtain, gradually let the farm run 
down; and when they die it is sold for whatever it will 
bring. There are farms all about where the grass land 
has not been plowed in 10 to 20 years, and some of it 
not top-dressed either, and it has been mowed every 
year, and still gives a half ton or so of hay per acre. 
Some of the farms have been bought by timber specu¬ 
lators, who with portable sawmills have taken off all 
the timber, also the cord wood, and now offer the farms 
for anything they can get; whatever they get being clear 
profit, as the timber has returned them more than they 
paid for the farm. 
As to the question. “Are they suitable for farming?” 
That depends on what kind of farming it is desired to 
do. For the raising of single crops like potatoes, for 
example, where large tracts of tillable land are in 
one piece, and where modern machinery can be used, 
most of these farms are not fitted. Usually they are cut 
up into two or three-acre lots by stone walls, which 
of course could be removed, but it would take con¬ 
siderable labor to do it. For diversified farming where 
the farmer keeps a pair of horses, two or three cows, 
a hundred or two hundred hens, with a few pigs or 
sheep, and aims mainly to make a comfortable living 
for himself and family, these farms are well suited. 
For the production of fruit, especially apples, there is 
no better land this side of the Pacific States. Prof. 
Henry, of the Wisconsin Agricultural College, “dean of 
the agricultural professors,” has left the State where 
his life work has been done, and come to Connecticut 
VINE AS WINDOW SCREEN. Fig. 179. 
to buy a farm because he can get land here near to 
good markets for $13 per acre, while land in Wisconsin 
not so near to markets, brought $100 to $200 per acre. 
As a member of the Agricultural Committee of the 
Connecticut Legislature, I recently had the pleasure of 
listening to an address by Prof. Henry, and the above 
statements about prices of land are from his own mouth. 
No western farmer need fear any trap or trick about 
the price of these farms; it is the honest truth that 
many good farms can be bought for less than the build¬ 
ings cost, or could be replaced for. It is also a fact 
that Connecticut farms are rising in value, the asking 
price being double in many instances what it was four 
or five years ago. geo. a. cosgrove. 
In Competition With Russians. 
I will try to tell you what has happened in the past 
30 years in the school district where I live and own a 
farm of 70 acres. The old folks have died off, and the 
children can get a living easier some other way than to 
farm it on these stony bushy farms. I am a carpen¬ 
ter by trade; have lived and worked in New York and 
Brooklyn several years, and when “Black Friday” came 
in 1873 the boss stopped business, and I was out of a 
job, and I struck out for the country. In my own case 
I have raised up three boys, all grown (have had a 
family of 12). They like farming well enough, but it 
docs not pay $2.50 for nine hours’ work. That is the 
price around here for ordinary workmen, and as fast 
as the boys get large enough they go to some trade or 
into some shop. Of my three who have left home one 
is a carpenter, one a painter, one an autoist. The boys’ 
leaving is one reason why farms ar cheap and then 
they arc cheap farms, and the Russian Jews are com¬ 
ing in on them. In my school district, within less than 
half a mile of where I live, seven have settled in the 
past year, and now it would be almost impossible to 
sell to anyone but a Jew, and of course that lowers the 
price. In this same district there are 18 more places 
where the children have left (or there had not been 
any) and the property will have to be sold at a low 
figure in a few years. In my location the farms are 
small; the timber has been cut off and the pastures are 
grown to bushes, the plow land is in little patches and 
stony if on high ground, and stony and mud holes on 
the lower land. I do not know of a farm where there 
are 10 acres that can be plowed all in one piece. I do 
A IIAM VIEW OF BERKSHIRE'S. Fig. 180. 
not believe there are many good farms located near a 
good market for sale very cheap. There is a creamery 
in my town, but there is no profit in selling cream on 
a basis of 20 cents a pound for butter, and that is all it 
has paid this Winter. I am not trying to run down my 
town. I am only stating the case just as it is. My farm 
is not for sale at any reasonable price. I expect to stay 
on it as long as I live; I have been on it 30 years, and 
have 30 acres of it so the mower will not strike a stone. 
1 am 60 years old; gave up getting rich long ago, al¬ 
though I am called a successful farmer. As far as 
getting rich is concerned it is out of the question, but 
there is the best living and much more agreeable to me 
than working at any trade. My table has the baked 
apples and cream and all the other fixings that the 
Hope Farm man tells about, and my girls know how 
to cook, too. G. B. Ii. 
Middlesex Co., Conn. 
Two Connecticut Reports. 
There are no farms near here that are held very 
cheap. We are on the line of the Connecticut Valley 
Railroad, and only a short distance from Connecticut 
River. In fact the price of land is stiffening up all the 
time. We expect a trolley line to cut us, east and west 
and north and south this Summer. There is a section 
of country about 10 miles northwest of us and about 
the same distance from railway or steamboat where 
land has sold very cheap. c. G. b. 
Centerbrook, Conn. 
It is the gospel truth, I am sorry to say, that many 
hundreds of our choice New England farms are for sale 
for much iess than it cost to budd the buildings, and 
they are not run-down farms either. Most of our pros¬ 
perous farmers have always kept their farms up in a 
high state of cultivation; they were not afraid of work 
themselves, and always until the past dozen years or so 
could hire plenty of first-class help. Now our towns 
and cities are so thick in the East that the working 
class of people can always get more wages by working 
shorter hours in the factories. The farmers’ sons and 
daughters can attend high school or business schools, 
after which they rarely want to go back on the farm 
to work. The parents get old, and sell if they can at 
almost any price, and move to town with the children. 
Another class of farmers who have boys who would 
grow up farmers and stay on the farms will not give 
the boy a chance to get along and enjoy himself as a 
boy must to be contented anywhere. The consequence 
is he goes to town, where he can have a little ready 
money to spend if he does have to live in a cheap 
boarding-house. The typical New England farmer 'is 
THE Y FORM OF KNIFFEN. Fig. 181. 
fast dying out. Everything is citywards, but the time 
is soon coming when things will form a new march, 
and, in fact, it has formed already. I firmly believe 
there is a better opening on the farm to-day for a 
young man who wants a clean, quiet business, than 
there is in the city. Farmers not giving their children 
a chance, hired help almost impossible to get, many 
farmers die leaving no children, farms are put in 
agents’ hands to sell regardless of cost, are the main 
reasons, in my opinion, for selling so cheap. c. H. b. 
Danbury, Conn._ 
GREEN MANURE AND POTATO SCAB. 
An inquirer in The R. N.-Y. recently wanted to know 
whether plowing in green manure made potatoes more 
scabby. With us, scab is worse on land rather alkaline, 
and an application of ashes is almost sure to increase 
scab. Plowing in anv kind of green crop has a tend¬ 
ency to make land acid, and with us is very seldom at¬ 
tended with a show of scab. In fact, the heavier the 
crop of clover, or rye even, plowed in the better crop 
we get and the better quality of potatoes. Our land is a 
fine loam of rather a sandy order. The best crop of 
potatoes we ever grew was after plowing in a crop of 
rye so heavy we could scarcely get it all into the ground. 
Niagara Co., N. Y. j. s. woodward. 
KING APPLE AND THE SCALE. 
At the last meeting of the Rhode Island Horticultural 
Society, during a discussion on the always debatable 
subject of the San Jose scale, it was stated by several 
members that in their apple orchards they had noticed 
that the King had been immune from attacks, even 
when all the trees around were badly infested. Is this 
a local peculiarity, a coincidence, or a fact of general 
importance? If there are varieties of apples that are not 
susceptible to the scale, it seems to me that there opens 
up a fruitful subject for an inquiry into the reason for 
such immunity that may prove of great value. It is a 
well-established fact that the LeConte, and to a less 
degree, the Kieffer, pear does not prove furnish a good 
feeding ground for the scale, and I think it probable 
that careful observation might enlarge the list of such 
immune or distasteful varieties, and although it may 
not be at once manifest as to how such knowledge 
would heln us in our fight with the pest, we never can 
tell where the clue is to be found. If you could start 
such an inquiry it might prove very useful, and would 
certainly be interesting. h. w. heaton. 
Rhode Island. 
R. N.-Y.—This is a good subject—let us have the 
facts. We have heard this statement about the King 
apple several times. It seems evident that this variety 
is not as susceptible to attacks from scale as some 
others, but it is unsafe to claim that it is fully “im¬ 
mune !” We consider it less so than the Kieffer pear. 
