1908. 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER 
735 
Hope Farm Notes 
One-Horse Farming. —It is doubtful 
if the large farmers will be interested in 
this question, yet I know how much it 
means to the woman who asks it: 
Is (here space enough to attach the 
“Wonder” plow trucks to the beam of the 
diamond-tooth weeder? I have the trucks 
but not tbe weeder, and I do not wish to 
purchase a tool of the weeder kind unless 
I can use the trucks on it. I desire a 
scratching kind of a weeder that will be 
steady and go straight while I lead my 
horse by the bridle. I successfully at¬ 
tached . them to an Acme and it was a 
success in keeping the cultivator steady and 
I could cultivate alone. With the right 
kind of a horse anyone can, but not with 
my horse, which is hard-bitted and also 
thinks she knows it all. I plowed three 
acres alone this Spring with a one-horse 
plow and the trucks. It was corn stubble 
land and was the first time I ever did this 
work, and it was a good job, too. I desire 
a fine-tooth weeder to use in seeding in 
corn and one that I can attach to the 
trucks, lead my horse and have the tool 
tend to business in a straight line and 
not vary and spoil the crop. It worked 
well on the Acme cultivator, but I want a 
spike-toofli also, if I can use it alone. 
My mother and I are on a 100-acre farm, 
and the help question is a serious one 
for us. Tbe wages are such that it would 
take the roof from over our heads to hire, 
and the quality of work they do is of the 
poorest kind in every respect. c. t. m. 
I presume you mean the tool which 
we call the diamond-tooth cultivator. It 
is shaped like other cultivators, with a 
wooden frame and fine spike teeth, flat¬ 
tened out at the end in diamond shape. 
In order to fit the plow trucks to it you 
would have to bolt on a piece of joist 
in front. With this I think the trucks 
would steady the cultivator so it would 
run quite straight. When seeding in 
corn, however, we find it necessary to 
follow with a hoe or iron rake and 
work the seed in around the hills. The 
plow trucks will steady the cultivator, 
though it will dodge more or less from 
side to side if the handles are not held 
securely. While the large farmers are 
calling for gasoline plowing outfits, hay 
loaders and all sorts of labor-saving de¬ 
vices, you will see that the one-horse 
farmers need help too. What a pity 
that horse is like some men when it 
comes to doing useful work! 
Big Stories. —Now that the yarn 
about the “Alaska” wheat has been ex¬ 
ploded people are asking what basis 
Abraham Adams had for claiming 200 
bushels per acre. As I understand it he 
grew one-eighth of an acre under very 
high culture, multiplied the yield by 
eight and called it an “average.” As 
everyone knows, you can get an enor¬ 
mous yield by planting single grains of 
wheat a few inches apart each way in 
rich soil and giving garden culture. 
That seems to be the basis of Adams’s 
claim. Under farm conditions he gets 
about 25 bushels of inferior wheat. We 
all know that heavy crops can be grown 
on small areas if all the conditions are 
right. My boys this season each took 
small pieces of land and grew potatoes. 
This is the way they raise their spend¬ 
ing money. These potato patches have 
had good care and are now giving 
at the rate of $200 or more per acre. 
I cannot duplicate that yield on large 
areas with potatoes. We have quite a 
number of four-year-old Carman peach 
trees which gave this year $5 worth of 
peaches. There are 175 of these trees 
to the acre, but we have not come any¬ 
where near this yield for all. I have a 
new kind of corn that I think well of. 
If I wanted to play the Abraham 
Adams game I should pick out the fin¬ 
est hill and weigh the ears. Some of 
them will run two pounds to the hill! 
Then I would figure about this way: 
The hill occupies one square foot—- 
there are 43,560 square feet on an acre, 
therefore the yield is 87,120 pounds, or 
over 1,200 bushels of shelled corn per 
acre. In reporting this yield to the 
magazines and daily papers it would not 
be necessary for me to say that I 
weighed the green ears, or that there 
must be open space around each hill. 
The literary gentlemen who purpose to 
tell farmers what to do would not care 
for such details. Or I might tell an¬ 
other. I have one five-year-old Ben 
Davis apple tree with about a bushel of 
fine apples on it. These trees are in 
sod. Each year we have taken about 
a ton to the acre of hay from the land. 
The balance of the hay and large quan¬ 
tities of weeds and trash have been 
piled around the trees. The land on 
which these trees grow is assessed at 
$40. There are about 40 apple trees and 
35 peach trees on an acre. Now sup¬ 
pose on the basis of this one Ben Davis 
tree I came out and made the following 
claim. During the past five years an 
acre of land has given five tons of hay, 
worth $100. The cost of caring for one 
tree, including its original price, is about 
40 cents, or $16 for the acre. One tree 
gives 90 cents’ worth of fruit, which 
means $36 per acre, and one three-year- 
old peach tree has given 75 cents’ worth 
of peaches or $26.25 per acre. There¬ 
fore we have the following “conserva¬ 
tive” statement: 
Original cost of land.$40.00 
Expenses 5 years apple ... 16.00 
Expenses 3 years peach . 8.00 
Total .$64.90 
Income from hay, 5 years.$.100.00 
Income from apples . 36.00 
Income from peaches . 26.25 
Total .$162.25 
Now this is based largely on the be¬ 
havior of one tree, but it has more solid 
foundation of fact than hundreds of 
schemes in which honest people are 
asked to invest. When used in this 
way these so-called “big stories” are a 
perfect financial curse. People who 
ought to know better actually believe 
them and put up their hand-earned 
money to buy shares based on “what 
may be” or “at the rate of.” 
Suppose I came out with these figures 
and offered to sell shares in a com¬ 
pany capitalized at $75,000 to buy 200 
acres of cheap land and go to raising 
apples. My one Ben Davis tree would 
give me a stronger claim on the truth 
than is found in many a scheme in 
which people invest their savings. Day 
after day we are asked if such plans 
arc safe. I would like to know why 
people will send their money away to 
strangers when the home farm will pay 
twice the interest and be safe. 
Actual Yields. —But of course the 
literary gentlemen and others who 
would like’ to settle our future for us 
will argue like this: If you have one 
fine hill of corn, one fine apple tree or a 
fine patch of potatoes, or if one straw¬ 
berry plant will give a quart of ber¬ 
ries, why don’t you make an acre do 
the same thing? These people see 10,- 
000 pairs of shoes or a 1,000 watches 
or 5,000 chairs turned out of a factory 
so nearly alike that onlv an expert 
can tell them apart. Whv then, they 
ask, cannot a farmer have every hill 
of corn or potato just as good as the 
“best?” 
They deal with dead things while 
we handle the living. Bug, blight, 
drought, flood, all take a crack at a 
farmer's crops. Without question some 
seeds or trees are stronger than others, 
and some little spot of soil or some 
extra fertilizer jumps them along. That 
apple tree I spoke of was probably 
driven to early bearing by the scale. 
It was so badly stung that it stopped 
growing last year, and seemed to make 
one strong effort to mature a crop of 
fruit buds and then die. We killed the 
scale and started the tree into new 
life, so that it produced its crop. It 
may die now after all, but I think not. 
When a man starts out to see why he 
cannot make his crops uniformly good 
he learns more about the soil than he 
ever knew before. 
A young man told me the other day 
how he grew this year 10,000 ears of 
sweet corn to the acre and sold them at 
$1.50 per hundred. In his section there 
was the worst drought ever known for 
years. His soil was all tile-drained and 
he found that drainage was as useful 
in drought as in flood. This man went 
on to tell me how he denied himself 
and his family in order that he might 
under-drain the entire farm. He has 
tile now even around the chicken 
houses. Now he has control of the sea¬ 
son so far as moisture goes. His soil 
is more uniform, because there are no 
little damp spots_ all over it. He can 
work' it earlier in Spring, and there 
are better returns for the manure or 
fertilizer lie puts into it. The result is 
a more uniform growth all over the 
farm. This man has made me a great¬ 
er convert than ever to drainage! 
h. w. c. 
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LTTTVLVL 
CARRIED 
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Simply till up n Louden Litter Carrier 
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