1911. 
“THE LAND OF HEART’S DELIGHT.” 
A Sucker in Southwest Texas. 
Part II. 
STARTING A CROP.—About the middle of Jan¬ 
uary I planted a large bed of tomatoes and began 
THE RURAL, NEW-YORKER 
end of the Summer, and got a 600-pound bale of cot¬ 
ton, held it till about the first of February, and sold it 
for $48, and had about $6 worth of cotton seed. The 
other five acres I planted in sorghum, millet and Kaffir 
799 
water between each row or between each pair of 
double rows if they are double rowed. As soon as 
the ground is dry enough, they are cultivated either 
hy hand plows or with a very small horse plow and a 
corn. This did not make a ton of feed altogether. I small Mexican mule or burro. Frequently the thrips, 
setting them out about March 15. I had been told ’rt- 1 ^ ° T ° ni ° n l0USe ’ begins t0 infest the P lants ’ and that 
that there was big money in raising tomatoes here. ^ ,, f 1C pr3 1 s ' 1 ° n s( i e ' vas se m => calls for spraying, so a small onion field will keep several 
I hired Mexicans to transplant and hoe. I bought la ? T °!" . pe .f, ? . and Y' 0 n r ab ° Ut hands b «sy «ntil gathering time, which usually bc- 
stakes and had them staked and tied up. I hauled Y ^ u 1C ' J, . P rin S an so c oi a pro it o gj ns about the fi rst Q £ April anc j j asts t jjj a b out the 
water for them till the well was finished and the Mexi- 3 Y Y ‘ . W . aS 1 ^ “ St v< - ntl ’ re 111 axmt tenth of May. We usually run a horizontal cutter or 
a year and a half that had not lost me both labor and a , wppn .. „ . . tt . . . ., 
T , . , . . , , r a sweep under the roots with a horse plow, and they 
money. I tried raising eggplant the first Fall of my are then pulled by hand and placed in ^ windrows 
farming experience. I raised some nice eggplants and to dry and should be left for several da The Mexi . 
sent them to various commission firms. „„„ f A „ 
can families clip the roots and tops off with small 
shears, like sheep shears, and rub off the outside 
skins and place them in crates that hold about 50 
pounds. Five cents per crate is the usual price for 
gathering, cleaning and crating. These crates cost 17 
cents apiece. By the time the onions are 
in the car each acre has cost about $100. 
Of course the actual cost is varied by 
the different sized yield and method of 
handling. a. victim. 
cans and I watered, pinched buds and caught worms 
according to the latest improved scientific instruc¬ 
tions. We planted about an acre in two varieties, and 
ultimately found out that one of them would not bear 
in this country for any kind of price, and the other 
bore some inferior tomatoes that were not worth 
any kind of a price. I counted this failure No. 2, 
That relieved me of about $45 of my ready cash. 
Watermelons are another crop easily 
raised and came on the market so early, 
that they made lots of easy money. I 
rented four acres of nice new sandy 
land that had been Fall plowed and 
planted it with watermelons in Febru¬ 
ary. Most of them came up and made 
a fair growth, during the dry weather. 
As the melon rows were 12 feet apart 
I planted several rows of beans later 
between the rows. The melons bore 
well and about the time the first began 
to ripen I found occasionally a vine 
with its leaves cupped downward, and 
on examination found the underside of 
such leaves lined with the melon aphis, 
commonly called honey-dew, because 
they cause the leaves, vines and fruit to 
become covered with a sticky substance 
about the color and consistency of 
honey. This insect spread over the en¬ 
tire field within a couple of weeks, de¬ 
stroying the vines gradually as it pro¬ 
gressed. I shipped 125 melons that 
would weigh from 20 to 25 pounds each, 
and at another time about 49, all shipped 
during May, and when the returns came 
I received for the first lot five cents 
apiece and for the others three cents 
apiece. These were shipped with a car¬ 
load, so it was not the express com¬ 
pany that got all the consumer’s dollar. 
One-fourth of the proceeds went to the 
land owner and all the rest was mine. 
I then learned something that the real 
estate men had evidently forgot to tell 
me, that this honey-dew is very common 
in this country, and often destroys whole 
fields of melons, cantaloupes and cu¬ 
cumbers, and if there are any left the 
railway companies, the express compan¬ 
ies and the commission men usually 
keep the producer from becoming cor¬ 
rupted with too much of the root of all 
evil. 
MORE ABOUT BEANS.—The bean 
crop on this tract did somewhat better. 
I had the Mexicans harvest and thrash 
about 600 pounds, turned over one- 
fourth to the landlord, who sold them 
for 3 ]/i cents per pound. I had paid 
the local merchants five cents per pound 
for the seed to plant, but at this season 
of the year these merchants would not 
buy many, because the weevil was bad. 
I did not have to sell my beans at such 
price, so I got some heavy paper sacks 
and put about 40 pounds of beans in 
each sack; then I put about two 
ounces of bisulphide of carbon in a 
small bottle, left it uncorked in the top of each sack 
and tied the sack up tight, so Mr. Weevil could not 
get his breath from the outside if he was inside the 
sack, and could not get into the sack if he was outside. 
About two months after putting those beans away so 
carefully, I examined them and found some live 
weevils in some of the sacks. I again put more “High 
Life,” as it is called, in the sacks as before, but ulti¬ 
mately the weevil got those beans, except about two 
or three sacks. Then I tallied up a compound failure. 
COTTON PLANTING.—I had rented 10 acres of 
newly cleared land to plant in cotton and feed crops. 
I took great pains to plow it extra deep and to pul¬ 
verize it well, planted five acres in cotton, of the most 
expensive seed I could get. It failed to come up to a 
good stand, and I planted part of it the second time, 
and it came up well, but the web-worms destroyed it. 
I cultivated and hoed that five acres of cotton till the 
ONION CULTURE.—After the second failure of 
the beans as before stated, on my home place, I kept 
the ground thoroughly harrowed and in fine condition 
to plant onions. Bermuda onion raising in the Winter 
FOUR GENERATIONS OF A FAMILY COW. 
(See page 808.) 
Fig. 303. 
CONNECTICUT ALFALFA “TENTING ON 
GROUND. ’’ Fig. 304. 
THE OLD CAMP 
THE STUDENT LABOR PROBLEM 
I have been greatly interested in the 
various articles on student labor, that 
have appeared in The R. N.-Y. from 
time to time, and especially in those 
later ones from the pen of Prof. L. H. 
Bailey. As a short-course student of 
the class of 1906-7, I have the honor of 
that much acquaintance with that genial 
gentleman. It has seemed to me that 
the bitterest complaints were on the 
lack of executive ability on the part of 
the student, when employed as a fore¬ 
man or superintendent, to direct work 
and control the men under him. Good 
brother farmers, have you ever stopped 
to think what a small percentage of 
men in any business calling, possess real 
executive capacity? Is it fair to the 
agricultural college to think that execu¬ 
tive ability can be taught a student the 
same as any other subject? And again, 
how many, even of the very well-to-do 
farmers, are willing to pay the wages 
to which real executive ability is justly 
entitled? The writer was, some years 
ago, in correspondence with the man¬ 
ager of a rich man’s estate near New 
York City. He was expected to take 
charge of a small herd of Jersey cat¬ 
tle, make butter or cheese as directed, 
and must further, as per the correspon¬ 
dence, be an expert veterinarian, an ex¬ 
pert engineer, (steam or gasoline) and 
an expert in several other branches, and 
wages offered were $40 per month. I 
did not take that job. The agricultural 
college is not at fault, and it is the mis¬ 
fortune of students that they do not 
all possess inherently, the highest order 
of executive capacity. h. c. collins. 
- a 
PLAN FOR A CORNCRIB. Fig. 305. 
season here was then considered a very profitable in¬ 
dustry. Now Bermuda onion raising with Mexican 
labor is no soft snap. First we plant about three 
pounds of seed, for each acre, to be transplanted in a 
bed to raise plants. The planting is usually done from 
September 15 to October 10; when the young onions 
are about the size of a lead pencil, or a slate pencil, 
they are pulled up and transplanted in rows four inches 
between the sets, in the row, and the rows are usually 
about 12 to 14 inches apart. The transplanting is done 
by Mexican families, it being a class of work that the 
men, women and most of the children can work at. 
Transplanting is done usually from November 15 to 
January 1. It is seldom cold enough to hinder work 
here, even for women and children. We pay about 
three cents per row 100 yards long, and it usually 
costs about $12 per acre. As soon as possible after 
transplanting they should be irrigated, by running 
ALFALFA IN CONNECTICUT. 
At Fig. 304 is a picture of 10 acres of 
Alfalfa which I seeded about the first 
of September of last year. The yield is 
about 2 Yz tons to the acre, not much 
more or less than that. A field on an¬ 
other part of the farm that was seeded 
about the same time, in order to get at 
the exact weight of the Alfalfa on this 
plot, was measured by the Experiment 
Station and they made 94-100 of an acre 
and the yield was 5,210 pounds. This is at the rate of 
2.7 tons per acre. This was the first cutting. 
I have heard that it would be impossible to cure 
Alfalfa hay in our moist New England climate. On 
Saturday, June 10, I cut four acres of Alfalfa that 
stood about 33 inches high, with a thick, dense foliage. 
It was cocked up late in the afternoon on the 10th, 
and covered with cloth caps. It commenced to rain 
immediately after the caps were placed, and did little 
else but rain until Thursday, the 15th. Thursday, the 
15th, was a cloudy, lowery day, but very little rain 
fell. On the morning of the 16th I opened these cocks 
and aired them an hour or two in the more or less 
obscured sunlight, and drew in the hay during the 
afternoon—as nice a lot of well-cured Alfalfa as I 
ever put into my barn. chas. m. jarvis. 
R. N.-Y.—The picture looks like an army on the 
“tented field.” We wish all the battlefields could be 
seeded to Alfalfa. There has been some discussion 
as to whether it will pay the New England farmer to 
“fool with Alfaifa.” Mr. Jarvis proves that such fool¬ 
ing is wisdom. 
