‘Ibe RURAL NEW-YORKER 
1001 
Thoughts of a Plain Farm Woman 
.Tune Weather. —The poet sings hap¬ 
pily of the rare days in June, and while 
he didn’t exactly mean them in just that 
sense, June days in our part of the Em¬ 
pire State are apt to be Taw and rare in¬ 
deed—so generally, in fact, that early 
gardens and precocious crops are often 
cruelly nipped in the bud by a belated 
frost—and there you are! We set out 
several dozen buxom tomato plants the 
last week in May, and have held our 
breath ever since. The season was so late 
in our section, thanks probably to the 
near-Winter, that silo corn in many in¬ 
stances was not in the ground on Decora¬ 
tion Day, which day is sacred in our 
county to corn planting. It looks now as 
if we would all be grass-poor another 
Winter, as the rainy, cold weather seems 
to suit this crop to a T. Our barley 
cover crop for Alfalfa is growing like a 
weed, and oats look good. As an old 
neighbor onee said when someone was 
dismally predicting losses and poor crops, 
“The Ijord has always seen that there 
was something to harvest, and it looks 
foolish to me to doubt Him this year.” 
Certainly the most pessimistic among us 
can’t dispute her! 
Ornamental Gardening. —I enjoy 
reading the letters by other farm women 
in Tiie R. N.-Y. which tell about the 
flowers and shrubs, and how and what to 
do with them. Our old locust stumps and 
roots have been dug out and very labor¬ 
iously toted away, and now I am anxious 
to plant smaller things to take their 
places. I am very wise, man-fashion, on 
cows and potatoes and such like, but ter¬ 
ribly ignorant concerning the pretty vines 
and bushes and blooms that add so much 
to an old house like ours. So I am filing 
away all the lore which I come across in 
The It. N.-Y. that pertains to them, and 
by and by I shall put much of these con¬ 
tributors’ knowledge into practice. We 
have moved two large lilac bushes into the 
yard and a big clump of Golden Glow is to 
follow. The elm trees to take the place 
of our locusts cannot materialize this 
year, as the men and teams are far too 
busy to fuss to move them. The old Utica- 
Binghamton canal used to pass through 
our farm, and its bed is now grown up 
to elms. Almost life-sized trees can be 
safely moved in this variety, and some 
day I hope they can come down to guard 
over our roof. I want a typical “old- 
fashioned” flower garden in the back¬ 
yard and wish I were smart enough to 
have the luck with the prett^ things that 
most women do. But I shall have to be 
content to put my trust in the columns of 
The It. N.-Y. and select and tend and 
nurse along per directions. Alas, if flow¬ 
ers were only as easy to grow as potatoes! 
I have a weakness for asters, tulips, Cro¬ 
cuses, sweet peas and geraniums. All 
our yard boasts now is a big syringa bush, 
a clump of flowering almond, very old rose 
bushes, white, pink and yellow, and the 
before mentioned lilacs and Golden Glow. 
Several years ago I had visions of holly¬ 
hock borders for the front path. Wc set 
out thrifty plants according to the advice 
of the donor, hut they never did a thing. 
I want to try hollyhocks again, as they 
are particularly appropriate for an old 
homestead, but probably luck will be 
against us as usual. Next Winter in the 
slack season we are going to make win¬ 
dow boxes to hold geraniums another 
Summer. The red ones in borders and 
boxes are so cheery and “easy to look at.” 
W e have planted pole beans to run up the 
porch trellises for the present, and later 
hope to transplant the common wild Cle¬ 
matis which grows on every country 
fence. I want vines and morning-glories 
creeping up the sunny windows, and the 
whole big yard just polka-dotted with 
flower beds and shrubs and plants. I’er- 
haps they will decide to be good and 
grow for me if I do my best. 
The Pantries. —Our house is probably 
150 years old, and when we came back 
to live in it for good, the interior was as 
unhandy as such aged homes can some¬ 
times be. A friend, upon rambling 
through it, suggested in fun that we 
ought to name it “The Pantries” in true 
English style, as she had never seen be¬ 
fore so many tiny closets and pantries 
combined under one roof. There were 
four rooms originally, all the size of the 
usual pantry, which we had made into 
our present kitchen, while the big kitchen 
with the fireplace at one end makes a de¬ 
lightful dining room. My mother recalls 
that great-grandfather used to stand in 
the farthest inner pantry, and peering out 
of a tiny window, would loudly thump 
with his cane, and all the little grand¬ 
children and cousins would come running 
to receive peppermints through the tiny 
window. They stood really in much awe 
of great-grandfather, who was then a very 
old man, but it was deliciously exciting 
to be in at the peppermint feast. My 
children thrill to the peppermint story, 
and daily deplore that the mysterious pan- 
tries were ruthlessly torn out. But how 
the work is lightened for busy farm- 
mothers. 
Redskin Neighbors. —Our farm is on 
the site of the Indians’ hunting grounds, 
and every Sunday and oftener, men and 
boys, especially after plowing, may be 
seen strolling over the fields in search of 
arrow's and Indian implements. Many 
are still found, although the crop is fast 
disappearing. The children love the mys¬ 
tery of all this, and think it great fun to 
tell visitors of the time when great-grand¬ 
mother found an Indian asleep under the 
hall table, and how her 13 children (may¬ 
be all 13 hadn’t arrived on the scene at 
that time) made ropes of the bedding and 
lowered themselves out of the upper win¬ 
dows rather than go downstairs past the 
snoring and uninvited guest! And when 
ray youngsters lie in front of our present 
dining room hearth pleading for “stories” 
you can guess that their favorites concern 
the Indians, and they shiver and shake 
with enjoyable thrills when my mother 
tells of how her grandmother used to have 
Indian callers in front of this very fire¬ 
place—kind Indians who liked white people 
and came to our house for a friendly chat 
once in a while. The reason why I am 
telling these anecdotes of a by-gone gener¬ 
ation is because the average farm is too 
often considered as a dull, drab place, ab¬ 
solutely devoid of adventure, while in 
reality it once probably teemed with hap¬ 
penings that would make the present day 
“movies” seem tame indeed. 
Home Memories.— Already I am fool¬ 
ishly crossing my bridges far ahead of 
time, and fearing that our three children 
will tire of the farm and will wish to seek 
their fortunes in the city. Children long 
for romance and, life, and if the farm 
doesn’t possess it, look out! So in order 
to throw a glow around it, we have kept 
green the old tales and stories of Indian 
days, and the youngsters as a consequence 
see the everyday farm as a wonderful 
place where the things one reads about 
actually happened. Perhaps this will not 
hold them later on. but if tradition won’t, 
nothing will. I believe that it pays to 
teach the children that home is the finest 
place in the world, bar none, and the 
more out-of-the-ordinary happenings 
which once took place upon it that can 
be remembered, so much the better. We 
all live in the past to a degree, and mem¬ 
ory makes it seem more glowing than we 
thought when living it. Ann and Alan 
are sure now that wild horses could not 
drag them away from the family acres, 
and they are very proud of having a 
house and farm connected with the glam¬ 
or of Indians. I hope they will always 
feel that way. 
Time’s Changes. —All around us farms 
are being sold, and new neighbors take 
the places of old ones. Of course this is 
natural to a degree, but it does seem as if 
in many cases it was a great pity. The 
descent of estates from father to son, as in 
England, is almost a lost art here. Why 
is it that people forsake the country for 
the city, and prefer the latter’s unhome¬ 
like discomforts to the former's undeniable 
trials? Now that we are going to get fair 
prices for milk and our other crops, I 
hope some of the deserters will take heart 
and return to the land once more. There 
are but very few families left in our town 
who have owned their farms for genera¬ 
tion after generation. I think that we 
must be among the oldest, as the land, not 
the house, was given to my great-great¬ 
grandfather for services rendered as a 
sergeant in the Revolutionary War, and 
it has never been out of the family since. 
We of this generation like to remember 
these things and cherish them, but the 
question is, will our children care a snap 
of their fingers for family tradition when 
the world is moving at its present speed? 
Time alone can tell. Probably when the 
youngsters are grown up. airships will bo 
as common as Fords, and Egypt will be 
known as a commuting country a few air- 
miles off. It is rather staggering to try 
to look into the future, and one can’t help 
hut wonder if such common things as 
farms and food will be needed at all! 
But for today, I think that things look 
quite cheerful. We are sure to have a 
harvest, come what may, as my old neigh¬ 
bor said, and milk and meat and corn and 
wheat are going to bring what they are 
worth. We have hung on through trials 
and tribulations, and perhaps the farmer 
is going to have his turn at last. Can 
anyone be so hard-hearted as to begrudge 
it to him? H. S. K. W. 
Destroying Ants 
The troublesome ants are mentioned on 
page 8S3. I will give my experience. 
Several years ago I had a serious diffi¬ 
culty with the pests, the large black kind; 
would find them on the dining table. My 
house is one of the old farmhouses, and I 
think the ants had had their own way a 
long time. I tried several advertised 
methods of getting rid of them, with no 
success, but one trial of my own is a suc¬ 
cess. I took a small can cover, used half 
a teaspoon Paris green, same amount of 
sugar, mixed into a paste with milk, 
spread a small quantity on pieces of paper 
and placed on back part of table out of 
way of danger of getting on dishes. On 
third day no appearance of ants; none 
since for four years. My sister had same 
trouble; I made same application for her 
and up to this date she never has had fur¬ 
ther trouble. I believe it was the best 
and easiest way of extermination, and 
this mixture, placed on chips or stones 
near their hills, would be just as effective 
in doing away with this annoyance. It 
surely is worth u trial. w. s. M. 
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