rso 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[April, 
follow him into the vineyard. He is examining his grapes, 
he finds a cluster of fair ones, with a hole through the 
upper side of some of them, and bees and hornets 
around most of them, if the day is warm enough, busily 
engaged sucking the juices. Here is proof that satisfies 
him that bees alone have spoiled his grapes. The same 
kind of proof would satisfy some, that when the larvse of 
the flesh fly was found devouring the carcass of a putrid 
animal, that they were the cause of its death. The same 
kind of evidence has proved that the moth worm has 
destroyed bees, when they only completed the destruc¬ 
tion that was inevitable from other causes. A negative 
can not often be proved. I can not say that bees never 
puncture grapes; but I can say that I am satisfied that 
they never do any more than the flesh fly kills the animal. 
I have 4 or 500 grape vines and other small fruits, as well 
as apples and pears, and a large apiary, all in one local¬ 
ity. I have no interest to bias me, and ought to be able 
to judge somewhat understandingly. If I was called to 
testify in such case, it would be of what I know. I have 
seen bees on grapes; sometimes two or three on one, 
when they had been punctured so as to expose the juices. 
I have watched them long and patiently, to see them at¬ 
tack sound fruit, and never yet saw one do it—and no 
man of veracity ever told me that he had. The last 
season I had several barrels of delicious pears. I have 
seen bees on them—a dozen on one—and other bees en¬ 
deavoring to get a chance at the orifice already made; 
and this while the sound ones of the same variety re¬ 
mained on the trees untouched. But when one had 
fallen, and was bruised sufficiently to expose the juice, it 
was attacked without hesitation. The same with apples ; 
as long as sound on the tree they were not molested ; 
but when taken to the cider-mill—only a short distance 
from my bees—and ground into pomace, tens of thousands 
would sacrifice their lives in their eagerness for the 
juice. 
Relative to grapes I would say that I have visited the 
vineyard early, long before a bee was stirring. Found 
grapes—tin ee or four in a cluster sometimes—particularly 
Concord—with a narrow strip of skin peeled off—loose 
strip often left—the pulp fresh, and no juice gone, which 
wo ;.d not have been the case if bees had been the cause. 
Yet the grape was as effectually spoiled for market as if 
the bees had sucked it dry. What did to it? If I make it 
clear that the bees did not, am I under any more obliga¬ 
tion to trace ; t to the starting point than Mr. F. or any 
other man? Will Mr. F. watch the Robins a little closer, 
and see if some of the strange, ones, on their way south, 
may not be tempted to peck through the skin of the 
grape as well as pear—perhaps oidy to find the grape un¬ 
palatable.—See “ New trick of the Robin,” page 103, 
last month’s Agriculturist .—I want old bee-keepers as well 
as beginners, and those interested to look at these tliiugs, 
not to substantiate a preconceived opinion, but to get the 
facts, even if some notions ate upset that appear to be 
well founded. 
Feeling much regard for Mr. Fuller for what ho has 
done in horticulture I should be pleased, if on investiga¬ 
tion it should appear that what is attributed to him he 
has not said. 
Many of our feathered songsters have been accused of 
destroying the farmer’s crops by the unreflective, and 
have been slain by thousands, but investigation gave 
them credit for actually assisting the farmer, and a few 
have thought best to let them live and take the good they 
do to balance the evil. Will Mr. Fuller, or some one 
equally capable, just tell us if the bee does not help the 
farmer somewhat in aiding the fertilization of the fruit 
flowers, thus balancing some of the possible evils, and 
then, if he can establish the actual damage over the 
balancing benefits, the bee-keeper can choose between 
“ taking care of his bees,” or paying the amount assessed 
in dollars and cents. As the damage complained of 
never takes place in a season of honey, they can be kept 
from trespassing more cheaply than cattle. 
Other complaints of damage have appeared, which I 
would like to examine some time, and see how close a 
man can come to proving a thing and not do it. 
John Johnston. 
The readers of the American Agriculturist 
will be pleaded to see the portrait of that dis¬ 
tinguished farmer, John Johnston, given on 
the first page of this number. The portrait is 
given without his knowledge, and we dared 
not ask him for any facts in regard to his life, 
for fear he might suspect our purpose. We 
must, therefore, confine our remarks to a few 
of the more prominent events of his career. 
John Johnston was born in New-Gnlloway, 
Scotland, in the year 1791. Many of his early 
days—-and nights also—were spent on the hills 
tending his grandfather’s flocks of sheep. 
“ Whatever I know of farming,” he once said 
to us, “ I learned from my grandfather.” And 
right nobly have these early lessons been re¬ 
duced to practice throughout a long and emi¬ 
nently successful life. “Verily all the airth 
needs draining,” was a remark of Grandfather 
Johnston in Scotland. We shall see how well 
the boy Johnston, some years later, in far dis¬ 
tant America, applied the idea to practice on 
his recently purchased farm. 
Mr. Johnston married in 1818, and came to 
this country in the spring of 1821. After look¬ 
ing about for a few months he selected and 
purchased a farm lying on the eastern shore of 
Seneca Lake, near Geneva, N. Y. The land 
lies on a high ridge, and a casual observer would 
not be likely to suspect that it needed draining. 
The soil is a rich, calcareous clay, but when he 
purchased was in a badly run-down condition. 
Mr. Johnston being poor had to run more or 
less in debt, and his neighbors predicted that 
he would soon be sold out. Here he commenced 
his life-work, and here he has lived for 52 years. 
“ I have always been an anxious man,” he once 
said to us, but his anxiety was of that kind 
which stimulated industry and quickened 
thought. He believed in hard work and good 
farming. He had his trials and discourage¬ 
ments like the rest of us, but when he stumbled 
he came up ahead. He had unbounded faith in 
himself. He was not afraid to run in debt for 
land or for the capital necessary to improve it. 
He did not believe in small farms. “ I do not 
know how to manage a small farm,” he once 
said to us. He was quite as capable of man¬ 
aging his farm of three or four hundred acres 
as one of fifty acres. 
Mr. Johnston’s leading crop has always been 
wheat. Everything else was secondary to this. 
But he has also made a good deal of money by 
fattening sheep and cattle in winter. “But,” 
said he, “ I never made anything by farming 
until I commenced to drain.” 
He commenced draining his land in 1835. 
He sent to Scotland for a pattern and got tiles 
made by hand. His neighbor, the lamented 
John Delafield, imported a machine for making 
tiles in 1848, and from that time Mr. Johnston 
laid tiles as rapidly as he could get the work 
done by the ordinary labor of the farm. “It 
cost me more,” he once said to us, “ than it 
would to have had the whole work done as 
Mr. Swan did it, at once, but I had to get the 
money from the crop on the drained field to 
pay for draining the second field.” In fact, his 
draining paid for itself as it progressed. The 
extra yield of one crop of wheat frequently 
paid the whole expense of the draining; and in 
no instance did he fail to get all his money 
back in two crops. In 1851 he had laid sixteen 
miles of tile drain on his farm. In 1856, when 
we visited him again, he had between fifty-one 
and fifty-two miles of tile drains, and we be¬ 
lieve nearly every tile had been laid with his 
own hands. 
Underdraining was a new thing in those days. 
Some of the neighbors said, “ John Johnston is 
gone crazy—he is burying crockery in the 
ground.” But mark the result. When the so- 
called weevil, or midge, proved so destructive 
to the wheat of Western New York that nearly 
all the farmers thought they should have to 
abandon the crop; when on many farms the 
wheat would not yield ten bushels to the acre, 
we visited John Johnston (in 1856) and found 
he had sixty-two acres of wheat that almost 
bid defiance to the midge. He had that year 
twenty-five acres of Soule’s wheat that averaged 
33| bushels per acre; and his red wheat was as 
stout as it could grow. In 1859 his crop of white 
wheat averaged over 41 bushels to the acre. 
It would be an error, however, to attribute 
Mr. Johnston’s success solely to underdraining. 
He has cultivated his land very thoroughly. 
He is a strenuous advocate for summer-fallows 
—plowing three, and occasionally four, times. 
He has made his land dry, clean, mellow, and 
rich. He grew great crops of clover for many 
years, dressing the fields liberally with plaster. 
After his land became rich he has grown timo¬ 
thy grass as well as clover, as he thinks he gets 
more and better hay. He has used lime with 
great benefit on his wheat. He has also used 
salt—a barrel per acre on his wheat—with re¬ 
markable results; he has sometimes used as much 
as seventy-five barrels of it in a year. He has 
also used more or less Peruvian guano. But in 
all his operations he has never lost sight of the 
manure heap in his barn yard. He has raised 
great crops of clover and fed it out on the farm. 
He does not plow it under. His corn, stalks, 
and straw, are all consumed on the farm, and 
for many years he bought tons and tons of oil¬ 
cake to feed with his straw. In this way he 
made great quantities of manure—and it was rich 
manure, not rotten straw. He piles his manure 
in the spring and uses it as a top-dressing on 
grass in the summer or autumn, the land being 
plowed up the next spring for corn. 
Personally, John Johnston is tall and fine- 
looking, every inch a gentleman. He is tem¬ 
perate in all things. He neither drinks spiritu¬ 
ous liquors nor uses tobacco ih any form. A 
stranger seeing him in a select company would 
pick him out as a gentleman of the old school 
—perhaps a distinguished general or statesman. 
He would hardly suppose he was “ nothing but 
a farmer ”—that he had spent his life in a quiet 
farm-house; that he had followed the plow, 
dressed hundreds of sheep for foot-rot, and laid 
fifty miles of underdraining tiles with his own 
hands. And the stranger would be right. John 
Johnston is a distinguished man. He has led a 
most useful and honorable life. He has made 
money—and made it solely by farming, not by 
speculation. He has lived comfortably and 
brought up and educated a large family. His 
children, grandchildren, and great-grandchil¬ 
dren, delight to visit the old quiet home on the 
borders of the deep and beautiful lake. Here, 
too, many of our foremost farmers like to go, 
as on a pilgrimage, to pay their respects to the 
man whom they have learned to honor. Here, 
respected and loved by all who know him, may 
his life long be spared, as a grand specimen of 
an industrious, intelligent, true, and independ¬ 
ent American farmer. 
Ogden Farm Papers—No. 50. 
Since making up the statement of dairy re¬ 
sults in the preceding article of this series, I 
have noticed a report on the same subject pub¬ 
lished by the Buffalo Live Stock Journal—to 
the effect that Mr. Cooper, of Wyoming Co., 
made an average per cow, in a herd of thirteen, 
of 4,928 lbs. (2,292 quarts) of milk. The net 
money proceeds averaged $66.63 pet cow—be¬ 
ing 1 3 Vioo cents per pound, or 2 8 %oo cents per 
quart. In addition to pasture he fed green 
oats and com fodder. Mr. A. Tefft, of Chau¬ 
tauqua Co., with a herd of twelve cows, made 
an average of 7,245 lbs. (3,370 quarts) of milk. 
O. Branson, Chautauqua, with seventeen cows, 
averaged 6,989 lbs. (3,250 quarts). A. P. Brun¬ 
son, with twenty-four cows, averaged 6,163 lba 
