1908 . 
TTHE RURAL, NEW-YORKER 
295 
Hope Farm Notes 
The Cook. —If you were to drop in 
upon me I should welcome you with a 
job, either peeling potatoes or cleaning 
the squash for dinner. Our folks have 
all gone to church. They went trailing 
off with every horse on the place except 
old Jerry and the brown colt, and will 
pick up several passengers on the way. 
Mother marshals the church army of 
this neighborhood as far as possible. A 
man with my hearing cannot enjoy the 
sermon, so I play the part of home de¬ 
fender and attempt to prepare a sermon 
over the stove. I thought I .was alone 
until I glanced behind me and found the 
old gray cat getting all ready to go back 
some centuries to her wild ancestors and 
pounce upon Grandmother’s bird. Out¬ 
side goes old Gray! Mother came in to 
repeat her instructions about turning the 
pot roast over on the back of the stove 
and to be sure and get the potatoes 
started in time. I might try my hand 
with a pudding, but canned peaches are 
better than an amateur’s pudding and 
I am not anxious to experiment with 
a sure thing. The frost is coming out 
of the roads just now and making a 
terrible fight at being disturbed. With 
arms of mud it grapples every wheel 
that passes. Both horses and humans 
will come back from church hungry as 
bears. There will be eloquent calls for 
my pot roast and vegetables, and I will 
bake an extra pan of apples also. If I 
had you here you could have your choice 
of peeling potatoes or fixing the apples 
for baking, my hope being that you 
would select the former. We are both 
of us old enough to know that the man 
who does these humble jobs well is a 
better citizen than he who half does his 
duty in the great affairs of life. We 
would turn this dinner into a short-lived 
monument. A man who doesn’t hear 
well must do most of the talking or say 
nothing. If he knows what he is talk¬ 
ing about his words may build a repu¬ 
tation for wisdom, though if he can look 
wise his silence will be stronger. He is 
at his worst when he talks and says 
nothing at the same time. So if you 
were here we would let our dinner speak 
for itself. 
d he Hillside. —This is a better place 
for us on the top of my hill after dinner. 
Our dinner was voted a great success. 
As soon as they got in the house Mother 
and the girls came to the kitchen and 
ran a critical eye over our arrangements. 
They might have found a few flaws here 
and there, but they passed them by if 
any appeared. When I was a boy I had 
to come home and hunt up the text and 
write out a page of the sermon before I 
could have any dinner! If I enforce 
that rule with my folks I fear most of 
our dinner would be left uneaten. Up 
here on the hills on Sunday afternoon, 
with the March wind tempered and the 
sun shining as if it were a month ahead 
for our especial benefit, we can forget 
the material things of life for a time. 
I would know you are doing so as I 
glanced at your face. You are silent 
looking off across the valley, seeing vis¬ 
ions of things gone or things hoped for. 
I know that look and what it stands for. 
I have had an old soldier up here—hard, 
soured and disappointed at the way the 
modern world treats an old veteran. He 
looked across our valley to the distant 
hills and his face brightened. It was 
like the country around Gettysburg, 
borty years and more dropped away 
from him. He stood there again in that 
line of steel no longer an “old vet,” but 
absolutely essential to his country. It 
was a great thing to see the old man 
straighten up and say: 
^ ell, thank God, we have a country 
anyway!” 
Last Summer while we were off fish¬ 
ing I saw the same look on a fisher¬ 
man’s face. He was tugging and haul¬ 
ing at the heavy lobster pots and look¬ 
ing off across the boiling water. There 
was just that same expression of the 
pride and joy of labor—the glory of 
service to mankind. I have seen the 
same thing on the faces of farmers— 
when they stand as we do to-day—with 
Spring dancing up the vallley or as they 
pause a moment from their work to 
look off across the fields. All these toil¬ 
ers see visions. They might laugh at me 
if I told them so, yet they are for the 
moment dreamers and vision painters as 
truly as were the dreamers who through 
all the ages have molded their dreams 
into history and made it softer and 
truer. A dream or a vision is a safety 
valve for the soul. I do not know which 
would be worse, to have no safety valve 
so that a man could never dream a liv¬ 
ing vision or to do nothing but dream 
and thus let all our powers of will 
escape the hard, stern duties of life. 
Neither one for us on my hillside. We 
will have our hour of the impossible 
things of earth and then we will turn 
them into a pleasant memory and go 
back with a better heart to the work 
that is right at hand. It is pleasant to 
look to the south of our valley and 
catch a glimpse of color where my 
neighbor has the flag flying from his 
pole. 
Farm Work. —And there is plenty of 
work. The fruit trees are now large 
enough to show what they are coming 
to with care. It took some years to 
show that those little sticks cut back so 
the nurseryman wouldn’t know them and 
root pruned to stubs would ever be any¬ 
thing but playthings. Now they show what 
they are coming to and are working 
things without doubt. When they come 
out in leaf I will try to print pictures of 
them to show what they look like. Nearly 
half our spraying was done by March 15. 
We did some \tfork at it during mild 
days of Winter and whenever the wind 
will permit we are at it now. We use 
“Scalecide,” one part to 16, and with 
two lines of hose on the gas sprayer 
quick work is made among our young 
trees. With the larger trees the work 
is much slower, particularly because the 
heads of these old trees are badly 
formed. There are too many crooked, 
ingrowing branches, one protecting an¬ 
other from the spray. I am learning 
one thing over and over again every 
year. It pays to start with small trees 
severely cut back to a single stem. Then 
you can shape the head as you please, 
and it is now settled that we must' have 
a peculiar shaped head, not only on the 
tree, but on the man if we are to fight 
the scale properly. The tree’s head must 
be open and broad so as to freely admit 
the only arguments that will kill the 
scale. The man’s head must not be too 
open, but rather with all the marks of a 
stubborn fighter, who will not listen to 
argument in favor of experimenting or 
letting up against the scale. I am also 
sure that if a man is to expect a good 
orchard under mulch he must start the 
trees right; that is, closely root-pruned 
so they will root deeper and form more 
tap roots. I am aware that some of our 
scientific friends deny that this root 
pruning will change the system of tree 
rooting, but my trees do not argue with 
theories. I am very sure that my root- 
pruned trees at five years old are now 
rooted deeper than the long-rooted trees 
in cultivated ground. 
We shall have several experiments 
under way this year that interest me. 
One large block of apple trees now in 
sod will be kept as it is. We plan to 
put 50 pounds or more of decayed forest 
leaves around each tree and part of the 
grass. Nearby is another block of trees 
where the grass seeding has run out. 
We plan to plow this, leaving a strip of 
sod some five feet wide along the rows. 
The grass on this strip will be cut and 
put around the trees. The middles will 
be planted to our flint corn and given 
good culture with fertilizer. Crimson 
clover and Cow-horn turnips will be 
seeded in the corn. Across the lane 
from this block another larger one will 
be handled in another way. A strip wide 
enough for two rows of potatoes will 
be plowed on each side of the row, the 
potatoes will be well fertilized and thor¬ 
oughly tilled, the middles being now in 
rye, which will be seeded to clover about 
April 1. We shall see which gives best 
results—plowing the rows or the middles. 
Chances are good as I write for a good 
peach crop, as few if any of the buds 
have been killed. The strawberries are 
in good condition. The Crimson clover 
is hesitating, but I hope some of it will 
hang on. The Alfalfa is having a hard 
struggle to make good its hold. I would 
bet on it if at all more though hope and 
friendship than anything else. Of 
course the robins and bluebirds have 
come. Our folks are tuning up for the 
battle which will soon be here. 
H. w. c. 
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WALTER K * WOOD 
NEW CENTURY BINDER 
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Mowing & Reaping 
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Hoosick Falls, 
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