7SO 
THE RURAb NEW-YORKER 
tender mercies of the commission man. Futting on my 
wagon for Boston a box of fancy Wealthy apples I 
said to the driver (not an extra good salesman) : 
“This should bring a dollar or near it; if not offered 
well toward it, leave with the commission house to 
sell.” He was offered but 65 cents, and so left it with 
the house, who returned me 25 cents less commission. 
I was satisfied that this box of apples they sold for me 
to themselves at that price, and for themselves at quite 
another at retail, losing me 40 cents, because the buyer 
and seller were the same party, and taking more than 
150 per cent for themselves as a fair profit for retail¬ 
ing. Yet these same people in another department 
have sold for me thousands of dollars worth of pro¬ 
duce to my entire satisfaction. 
Fig. 274 shows Faneuil Hall building, just west of 
the Quincy Market and South Market street, the old 
“Cradle of Liberty,” which has also retail provision 
stalls on the street level. Butchers' wagons formerly 
gathering about this building made the beginning of 
the great farmers’ market of to-day, which for quality 
of produce offered and amount of sales, is said by 
good authority to be unequaled in the United States. 
Some gardeners market here produce to value of $50,- 
000 or more yearly, and these larger ones have their 
own salesmen, though one I know who plants 50 or 
more acres intensively, seven miles outside the city, 
gives all his business to one commission house. An¬ 
other large farmer of Concord divides his produce be¬ 
tween two firms and gets the advantage of competition 
between them for making the best returns. 
These near-by gardeners have heavy teams and 
carry in large loads over the level, hard roads leading 
into the market place. Bushel boxes are the common 
package (replacing the barrels that were formerly 
used) and of these 200, with the lighter produce, are 
often taken at a load. Last Summer a neighbor of 
mine carried with his two-horse team 178 bushel boxes 
of sweet corn to this market; a 20-mile trip from his 
home. The auto has not yet made an invasion of the 
market, but its appearance is expected soon. 
That Boston has a large foreign population is shown 
at the market when on the numerous Jewish holidays 
in the early Fall there is almost no business doing in 
the cheaper produce, such as the peddlers buy; and 
then again, 11,000 bushels of green peppers could 
hardly be sold by one grower in a season where Yankees 
were the only consumers. Yet these are still numerous 
in Boston, as you would believe when noting the quan¬ 
tities of beans, snap and shell, offered in market (also 
of sweet corn) in their season. I have myself shipped 
to one restaurant, at a time of flush business, 200 
dozen ears of sweet corn per day; and for seed shell 
beans, such as this market demands and will pay liber¬ 
ally for, I gave last Spring $10 per bushel. 
How are prices made here, may be asked. It is 
by the relation of supply of produce to the call for it, 
here as elsewhere, that these are determined. The deal¬ 
ers and the farmers coming here regularly, who have 
most experience and most at stake from their larger 
business, naturally lead in making a general market 
price for all offerings, varying with each day, and 
the smaller growers take this as a basis in their asking 
price, often shading it, from lack of confidence, or 
desire to clean up their loads quickly for any reason, 
There are drawbacks here from such causes, poor 
salesmanship, exposure to weather, etc., "but expenses 
are small, terms cash, and any grade of goods can be 
sold, and something realized from it. The ideal mar¬ 
ket of the future, under cover, with expert salesmen to 
handle the produce of a united farming interest, is not 
yet realized—even here. A neighbor one time with 
help of his two sisters in four hours’ time gathered 40' 
bushels of these beans, and returned from Quincy 
market with $80 as proceeds of their sale there. 
There is a large business done in Boston market in 
live poultry, which again shows the large contingent 
of Jewish population in and about the city; 5,000 live 
fowls are estimated to be sold daily on the street, 
while four times that number arrive by railroad from 
the West, as a well-informed dealer tells me. The 
largest dealer in these, and in dressed poultry, in the 
city I knew 40 years ago when he was a “hen man” 
driving about our section buying fowls and bringing 
them to the street market here to sell; getting inside 
the market he developed the poultry business till he 
had forty-odd branch houses in the West, and re¬ 
ceived stock here by the carload; and died wortli half 
a million by estimate. His business he learned in this 
market, but was by birth a Tennessean and an ex- 
Confederate soldier. It is an impressive sight of an 
afternoon in Summer or Fall to see rolling along the 
macadam avenues leading through Lexington, Arling¬ 
ton and Cambridge into Boston scores of suburban 
and country wagons, well loaded, well painted and 
well horsed, with names of their owners on seat side 
and canvas cover, all bound for the stands where the 
farmer can make free and direct sale of his produce in 
Quincy Market Place; and these are the questions that 
come to us from such seeing: Where can all this 
product of farm and garden and orchard possibly be 
consumed? Where is a more thrifty and prosperous 
body of farmers to be found than those of this sec¬ 
tion, and what city has a more productive country ad¬ 
joining it than has Boston ? e. f. dickinson. 
ANOTHER ALFALFA SERMON. 
Cut this out to refer to if you desire to raise Al¬ 
falfa. It will not fail you, but you will be loser if 
HOW THE TRANSPLANTER WORKS. Fig. 276. 
(See next page.) 
you disobey it. If your land is level so that water 
will stand on it, or if hilly, or if subsoil is heavy 
and tight, exchange for other land or tend in other 
crop. Sandy land is not suited to Alfalfa, but it will 
bear with this indignity if the subsoil is abundantly 
moist; besides, the porosity is enhanced by. sand, but 
sand on the* surface is just the same to Alfalfa as 
bran and sawdust for cow feed. Lime is necessary, 
but with constantly wet porous subsoil it will thrive 
off the air with almost no lime or fertility. The 
roots will go 25 feet to water if the plant is nursed 
till they reach it, but not through packed clay. If 
sown above clay in good corn soil it will thrive for 
a time, then you will be tempted to write The R. 
N.-Y. how you have been lied to concerning the value 
of Alfalfa. The majority of farmers who have writ¬ 
ten on the subject have undoubtedly not inspected far 
enough below the surface. To succeed well it must 
CHICKS WITH DIARRHOEA. Fig. 277. (See page 75L) 
be its own cover crop. It will sometimes do well 
sown in Spring, but is far surer sown about August 1, 
because it gets started at a time when grass and weeds 
are latent; however, it will not stand the heaving 
process of some soils in freezing so well as if sown 
in Spring. Plow your land in May or June; if you 
live in dry country harrow every time it rains till 
sowing time, anywhere else once each week, which 
ought to secure you a dust mulch seed bed, in which 
case 12 to 14 pounds of seed per acre will prove 
sufficient, better than 30 or 40 pounds when ground 
is cloddy. After sowing there is nothing more to do 
till the bloom begins to appear when it should be 
mown the first time and the hay all kept on the 
ground to protect the tender plants from the fervent 
sunshine, because just here is the first of many hid¬ 
den snags on which your boat will sink. If surface 
is wet and sky cloudy you may risk taking up this 
v 
YfjpKy y 
* m 
C.( v VI 
NORMAL TEN-DAY CHICKENS. Fig. 278. (See page 751.) 
first hay if stubble has been cut high, in some countries. 
The next snag perhaps is you will inadvertantly 
pasture your Alfalfa which you have been advised 
you may do when three years old, but you only have 
yourself to blame if you do and find no Alfalfa the 
next year, because the live stock will not eat the 
weeds and tough grass which constitute the chief and 
only effective enemy to your crop thereafter aside 
from pasturing. Better mow and feed each day, but in 
case you do pasture be sure to mow three times each 
year unless you make twice do the first year; this 
is the way and only way to save the crop being over¬ 
powered by other growth. 
July 15, 
Alfalfa will not reseed like many grasses, so to 
get more seed to grow one must cultivate bare spots 
by hand, or what is much better, with disk harrow. 
After the second year harrow should be run over the 
field after each mowing to cultivate the land and 
thicken the crop by splitting the stools. It sliould be 
cut when one-third in bloom. Hogs will live on Al¬ 
falfa hay alone. It is too strongly diuretic and di¬ 
aphoretic to feed horses at work, unexcelled as for¬ 
age for everything else. It can be stored in silage or 
put up without curing by sprinkling a peck of lime 
over each ton of green Alfalfa, though it will bleach 
it somewhat, and must not be so stored in barn for 
fear of spontaneous combustion. You cannot get 
seed off the crop except after many weeks of entire 
absence of rain, whether this be early or late in 
Summer is indifferent. No other crop will drown out 
as easily with standing water on surface. It only 
needs a little start in humus. It is hardly advisable to 
try stacking without curing unless nearly a thousand 
feet above sea level. If it is treated only half decent 
with lime and manure besides above suggestions, it 
will prove more profitable than any other crop raised 
in the temperate zone, and more persistent, not ex¬ 
cepting even orchard culture, but otherwise better 
take some other crop. In any case of failure the 
cause can be found above. l. s. tusler. 
Indiana. 
THE “LAVA” FERTILIZERS AGAIN. 
I inclose herewith a reprint from the “Technical World 
Magazine.” As far as I can mase out from the literature sent 
me, this man buys farms, fertilizes them with lava, and 
either sells them again, or raises produce on them and 
sells the produce. There seems to be a company formed, 
and they have shares of stock for sale at $10 par; share¬ 
holders being entitled to from five to 10 per cent discount 
on purchases of produce from the company. Now, the 
point 1 wish to seek knowledge upon is, can this lava do 
what this Mr. Ruegg claims for it in this reprint? I do 
not care to know anything about it as an investment, as 
I have nothing to invest in the ventures of others ; but it 
seems strange to me that our agricultural experts from 
the Department of Agriculture have not exploited the 
sterling qualities of this lava before this, if it will do what 
Mr. Ruegg claims for it. You will note he claims it will 
increase the yield and quality of plants many fold, and 
produce a plant resistant to all manner of disease, in¬ 
sects, and parasites. If his claims are true, would not this 
stuff revolutionize agriculture? J. c. 
New York. 
Yes, indeed, if these claims for “lava” were true, 
agriculture would be “revolutionized” out of sight. 
The article in question is a strange mixture of 
sense and nonsense. The late Dr. Voorhees, of the 
New Jersey Experiment Station, wrote these lava 
people asking for a guaranteed analysis of their goods, 
since the New Jersey law requires such guarantee of 
all fertilizers costing $10 or more per ton. The reply 
was that they did not claim any plant food! Analysis 
at the Connecticut Station shows about what we 
should expect from sifted coal ashes with small quan¬ 
tities of basic slag, potash and tankage added. It is 
easy to make “claims.” We have some splendid peach 
trees on the farm with piles of coal ashes around 
them. We might forget that we used fertilizer and 
manure also, and “claim” the coal ashes did it all! 
As for saying that “lava” produces a plant which 
will resist “all manner of disease, insects and para¬ 
sites”—there is but one suitable word to use— rot! 
Of course these gentlemen are forming a company 
to sell shares and produce. They may actually sell 
some shares to idiots and dreamers if they can get 
magazines to print their “guff” and their advertise¬ 
ments, but we sincerely hope that no reader of The 
R. N.-Y. will be silly enough to believe that our 
agricultural scientists are all wrong. 
ROOT GALL ON NURSERY TREES. 
We planted a small orchard this Spring, and found 
some of the trees infected with the root gall. None 
of them was in bad candition, and the trees would pass 
without question were they not carefully inspected, but 
we rejected all that showed any signs of it. These 
trees were returned to the nursery and willingly re¬ 
placed, but the same statement was made to which 
you refer, that many nurserymen claimed this root 
gall was not injurious. The nursery requested that 
all infected trees be returned, as they wished to plant 
them out by themselves and note further develop¬ 
ments. I have not kept informed in regard to the 
investigations of the crown or root gall since an ex¬ 
haustive paper by Dr. Forbes, read before the Illinois 
State Horticultural Society eight or 10 years ago, and 
more recent work may have changed somewhat the 
conclusions he arrived at, but it seems to me that 
there are too many contingencies in growing an or¬ 
chard to justify one in planting any but the most 
healthy, vigorous tree, and I do not think that I 
shall plant any that I know are infected with this 
trouble, or advise others to do so, until it is established 
beyond any question that it is harmless. 
Illinois. h. R. BRYANT. 
