71S 
amount that is evaporated from the surface of the 
ground. Probably the greatest problem before the 
agricultural world to-day is the supply of the 
needed water. In the first place, let us under¬ 
stand clearly that drainage water is not only un¬ 
available for the use of the plant, but is a positive 
damage to the crops we wish to grow. We have 
already said that the roots of our crops must have 
air. Drainage water excludes the air, and if a soil 
becomes saturated and remains so for even a short 
time our crops are injured and often killed. We 
see it every year. We cannot over-emphasize the 
fact that water in the form that we recognize it 
as water—liquid water, water that we use—is not 
used by the plant, but is injurious and should be 
gotten rid of as quickly and completely as possible. 
Plants use water almost alone in the shape of film 
water, and the ideal condition of our soils, for pro¬ 
moting the growth of our crops, is when each soil 
grain is surrounded with a film of water, and the 
spaces between the soil grains are filled with air. 
The soil is then moist, and the plant can secure its 
moisture from the water films on the soil grains, 
and its oxygen from the soil air. The value of a 
soil for agricultural purposes will depend very largely 
upon the amount of water it will hold as film water. 
It is clear that this will depend upon the size of the 
soil grains, and the physical condition of the soil. 
If the soil grains are large and coarse, there cannot 
be as much surface for the film moisture to collect 
upon as in fine soil. It is said that if equal dry 
weights of hard, lumpy soil, and finely pulverized 
soil are taken in separate vessels and allowed to 
absorb all the water they will hold, it will be found 
that the fine soil will hold three times as much film 
moisture as the lumpy soil. 
Drainage, by letting the air into the soil, as we 
have seen, is the prime factor in breaking down the 
soil and rendering it more porous, and thus fitting 
it to hold more film moisture. I have already re¬ 
ferred to the increased •bulk of drained soils. Drain¬ 
age, then, paradoxical as it may at first seem, both 
enables us to get rid of harmful surplus water, and 
to store up water in the available form of film water. 
Well-drained soil becomes a great storehouse of film 
water. This is why such soils withstand drought 
better than those that are undrained. 
Before leaving the subject of drainage, we must 
not fail to notice some of the incidental advantages 
it affords the farmer. * In the first place, it lengthens 
the season, because drained ground dries and warms 
so much earlier in the Spring. It lessens the cost 
of production, because the farmer can do his -work 
more nearly when it ought to be done. He can keep 
ahead of the weeds and be master of the situa¬ 
tion. It obviates the injury to our fields by tramp¬ 
ing by stock when wet. It prevents injury to our 
crops by heaving of the ground by frost, and by its 
cracking open in drying. It does away, as nothing 
else can, with the uncertainties of agriculture, and 
puts the farmer in a position wdtere he can count, 
as other business men do, on certain returns from 
labor and capital invested. F. l. allen. 
THE ONE HORSE JERSEY FARMER TALKS. 
MR. ALFRED JOHNSON’S STORY. 
The Man Who Made Good. 
Part II. 
Set out an acre of strawberries, or what you can 
sell close by; set the bed early in the Spring, rows 
three feet apart and 18 inches in row. Allow' them 
to run and make a row’ about 18 inches wide. Cut 
off all the surplus runners and don’t allow them to 
get too close. Be sure in setting out a patch that 
you have the proper kind. Some plants have only' 
imperfect flowers. If your plants are of the pistil¬ 
late or imperfect variety, you should have plants of 
the perfect blossom close by in order to pollinate. 
Be sure to keep all weeds dowm. If you w'ant to 
keep your bed in another year or more, after picking, 
mow off the plants, but not too close; then plow 
each side of the row, turning the furrow aw'ay, 
leaving about 10 or 12 inches in the center. Then, 
if you think the land is not rich enough for another 
crop, sprinkle some high-grade fertilizer in the 
open furrow, and cultivate. By that means you get 
loose ground, and the old plants throw 1 out new 
roots and more runners. I always get a larger crop 
the second and third years. When Winter sets in 
w'e cover with manure and coarse bog hay; in Spring 
rake this off the plants and leave it between; that 
keeps down the weeds and retains the moisture, w'hich 
is much needed when the berries are ripening. In 
setting out a large patch don’t put out all of one 
variety unless you are absolutely sure tne>' will do 
well on your land. Some varieties do well on some 
land, and are utterly worthless on others. The Glen 
Mary does finely on some high land but on low 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER 
ground it is worthless. The Great American, the 
finest berry that ever grew', I could raise very suc¬ 
cessfully on my low ground, but on high ground it 
w'as a failure. The best way to do is to buy a 
dozen or more of a number of varieties, try them 
and raise the kind that does best. Straw'berries re¬ 
quire abundance of manure to get the best results. 
If your soil is adapted to it potatoes are about 
the best paying vegetable ta raise. Be sure to raise 
ail your own vegetables and more if you have a 
good market. Blackberries and raspberries only for 
your ow'ii use; there is not much money in them, as 
they winter-kill often. Currants sell well nowadays; 
they can be grown between trees, as they do w'ell 
in the shade. 
Now' comes the chicken and egg business. All 
the land agents are advertising one-quarter to one- 
half acre plots to induce city folks to go out and 
make money raising chickens. With no experience 
and not land enough they invariably make a failure, 
but that was one of the best paying crops on my 
farm. I started in gradually, first reading up every¬ 
thing on the subject. Either hatch them in an incu¬ 
bator or under hens; I preferred the bens. Then 
have brooders ready, put in the chicks 24 hours after 
being hatched. For feed boil two or three eggs hard, 
chop up fine, give that the first two days, then give 
pin-head oatmeal, millet seed and cracked wheat. 
They •sell now a fine mixed feed for chicks; it is 
all right. See they ‘have plenty of fine gravel for 
grit. Don’t feed any raw ground food, as it will give 
them the diarrhoea. You can take ground cornmeal, 
middlings and bran, boil them and bake, crumble it 
up fine. Occasionally give granulated charcoal. As 
they grow older give cracked corn and whole wheat, 
fine chopped grass Is* good, but most of all look out 
for lice. If raised in brooders there are no body 
lice, but alw'ays the large gray head louse. You will 
have to look sharply to detect them. Take some 
melted lard, put in a few drops of kerosene, rub in 
on top of head, but not on the throat, as it will blis- 
TIIE AUSTIN QUACK GRASS DESTROYER. Eig. 414. 
ter; use sulphur and insect powder mixed. If not 
taken in time they will surely kill the chicks. Only 
raise a few' for the first year or two until you get ex¬ 
perience; then you can enlarge. Don’t attempt to 
start in at once on a large scale. 
It is very difficult nowadays to get satisfactory 
hired help. Very few w'ant to work on a farm, and 
a farmer cannot pay high wages, as he is not always 
sure of a crop. A man is better off doing his own 
work with the help of his children, if he has any, or 
one extra man. The great difficulty is in obtaining 
a small farm with buildings on wdthin w r agon riding 
distance of a good town or city. There are large 
farms near enough that are mostly idle. There are 
several in my neighborhood for sale, but they will not 
cut them up in small plots; therefore they have been 
in the market for some time. If they would only 
divide them up in five or ten acre plots, put up a cot¬ 
tage and a barn they could realize more than they 
could get for the w'hole farm. For instance, above 
me a person owned about 18 acres of land, part low 
and wet, but could be drained, full of brush. The)' 
had no use for it; tried to sell it for a number of 
years at a low price, but could not. Finally a man 
got hold of it, put on it a small house and barn, 
cleaned it up a little, then traded it off for city prop¬ 
erty, realizing over $1,000 profit on his deal. It w'ould 
be better if a person could buy just the land w'anted 
and put up his own house and buildings; set out 
trees, fix up and make the place look attractive; then 
if he w'as so disposed he could easily sell it and real¬ 
ize sufficient to pay for a larger place. On farms 
that are for sale nowadays the buildings are old and 
old-fashioned and mostly out of repair, so if you 
put up new ones they are up to date and you have no- 
further expense in keeping them in repairs for a long 
time. My house was old-fashioned and sadly out 
of repair. I have expended on it for repairs nearly 
enough to build a new one, and it is old-fashioned 
yet. My advice is buy the land you want, build and 
fix the place up as you desire, give a mortgage if you 
have to. That will inspire you to save money that 
would be spent for things you could do without for 
August 7, 
a while. It might be hard sailing for a few years, 
but you eventually would have a place that you never 
v.'ould want to leave. I could not be induced to leave 
the country and go to live in the city again. I fre¬ 
quently go to the city for a few days’ look around, 
then glad to get away. 
There are a number of families up my way where 
the men work in New York, going in and out every 
week day. They Jiave a few acres, raise all their 
vegetables and small fruits, and quite some .chickens, 
selling thejr eggs in town. They all seem w’ell pleased 
W'ith their undertaking, and I don’t believe they could 
be induced to return to the city to live. They mostly 
rent their places. They can get out here more easily 
and with more comfort than to the upper part of the 
Bronx. The commutation fare is only $6.45 per 
month. If a city man is not fore-handed enough 
with sufficient cash if he could retain his situation in 
the city, going in and out every day, he could hire 
some of his neighbors, farmers, to plow' up a strip of 
land and get ready. He could easily put in vegetables 
for his own use and attend to them morning and 
evenings and an odd day off once in a while. That is 
the way the persons up this way are doing and the- 
way I did for several years, only I had to remain at 
the city the whole week, as there w'as no convenient 
way to get back and forth at that time. 
_ALFRED JOHNSON. 
THE WAR UPON QUACK GRASS. 
Throughout the Northw'est quack grass is spread¬ 
ing so rapidly that the better class of farmers are 
quite concerned. The Minnesota Experiment Sta¬ 
tion expects to take one of the worst quack grass 
farms in .that State and try different methods of 
killing out the quack. It is said that this farm grows 
nothing but quack, and 1 for that reason ought to pre¬ 
sent a good subject for the experiment. All sorts 
of methods will no doubt be tried, including close 
pasturing and digging up the quack roots. The 
trouble is so bad that at Austin, Minn., a special ma¬ 
chine for pulling out these roots has been devised. 
A picture of this machine is shown at Fig .414, 
and the following description is given by one of our 
readers in that locality: 
“This machine consists of a sort of endless apron, 
set w'ith teeth and mounted upon wheels. When in 
motion this apron runs in the direction opposite to 
that in which the machine is moving. Or, to be more 
definite, the under part of the apron runs back¬ 
wards. The teeth dig into the earth and pull up the 
roots. The teeth are set into the apron in such a 
manner that they are about perpendicular when in 
the ground, but clear themselves of roots imme¬ 
diately upon coming out of the ground. The com¬ 
pany is experimenting with another machine, which 
looks exactly like a ^lay-tedder with a drag attach¬ 
ment behind. I will say in general that quack grass 
is the w'orst pest known to this section of coun¬ 
try; that it is spreading alarmingly, and continues to 
spread in spite of all means to exterminate it or 
check its growth.” b. Manchester. 
Mower Co., Mi nn. _ 
THE BROWN-TAIL MOTH. 
The introduction of the Brown-tail moth in New 
York State is not unexpected. It is bound to come. 
During the Odell administration I went before the 
Senate Finance Committee two years with photo¬ 
graphs, showing the ravages of the Gypsy and Brown- 
tail moths in Massachusetts, and urged that a spe¬ 
cial appropriation of $25,000 be made and placed 
at the disposal of the Commissioner of Agriculture 
to use for the extermination of these pests when 
they should first be discovered in our State. The 
committee w'as unanimous in making the recom¬ 
mendation both times, but Odell ran his blue pencil 
through the items when the appropriation bill reached 
him. Massachusetts has expended nearly $2,000,000. 
Private citizens have expended half as much more 
to save their trees, and it will yet cost more than 
$10,000,000, wdiile the extermination of the pest is 
practically impossible. 
I have the general charge of an orchard in New 
Hampshire of 10,000 apple trees, six years old, and 
last Winter bushels of the Brown-tail moths’ Win¬ 
ter nests were gathered and burned. If all who 
plant fruit trees will keep them low-headed by cut¬ 
ting the tops out in Summer pruning, these pests 
may be controlled, but when they get into the forest 
trees, it is at present a very expensive and about a 
hopeless task to keep them in check. New York 
State should spend money now vigorously wherever 
these pests appear, to destroy every vestige of them, 
for by so doing it will save millions hereafter, and 
every citizen should co-operate with the Department 
of Agriculture in a most aggressive campaign of ex¬ 
termination, which is possible on the start, but im¬ 
possible after a general spread has taken place 
GEORGE T. POW'ELL. 
