1410 
The RURAL. NEW-YORKER 
November S, 1924 
Hope Farm Notes 
We have had the most glorious Fall 
weather I have ever known. There was 
no killing frost on our hills until October 
18, That is 10 days later than the aver¬ 
age, and we greatly appreciate this ex¬ 
tension on the part of the supreme judge, 
Jack Frost. We got our corn cut and 
shocked without the wrinkle of a leaf. 
Home of the grain is soft, but these beau¬ 
tiful sunny days will dry it out. Now we 
are busy picking Baldwin apples on our 
high hill. The crop is good, and the fruit 
is mostly high quality. It seems to me 
that apple picking time—when the weath¬ 
er is right—is the most beautiful time of 
the year. The hill is bathed in clear, 
bright sunshine. Far away we can look 
east to the backyard of the Palisades, and 
down at the right the high skyscrapers in 
New York shoot up like beckoning fingers 
on the Island of Manhattan. I think as 
I watch them how many a young man has 
come down out of the hills at the sign of 
these fingers, only to find that they are as 
cold-blooded as fish hooks when once they 
have caught their prey. Today there are 
thousands of men and women in the great 
city who are discontented and unhappy. 
Perhaps they cannot tell just what has 
dropped out of life, but the thing that 
haunts them is the memory of some such 
day as this on some far country hillside 
where the apples gleamed in the sun and 
the changing colors of the valley spread 
out before them. Some of these men live 
in palaces—“great success” is written 
opposite their names. Others live in ten¬ 
ements or tiny flats, with “failure” walk¬ 
ing ever at their side. 
***** 
ladder and pick apples while balanced on 
one foot. That may be left to younger 
pickers. My job is to pick from the 
ground, where the lower limbs hang down 
in great crimson ropes of fruit. This 
gives one a chance to think things out as 
he picks. Up on the ladder such mental 
occupation might be dangerous. A few 
weeks ago, while cutting corn, I came to 
the belief that while methods have 
changed somewhat, we are still growing 
corn in much the same way that our 
grandfathers did. Apple growing has de¬ 
veloped, but some of the essential fea¬ 
tures have not changed. No one seems to 
have perfected an apple picker that will 
give satisfaction. I have seen several of 
such machines, but they give too many 
bruised apples. The general principle is 
that of an inverted tent or umbrella 
spread out under the tree. The apples 
are shaken down into it, and they run 
out through a hole at the bottom. On 
our thick-headed trees the falling fruit 
would hit too many limbs and be badly 
bruised. Where the trees are pruned to 
a wide open head like an umbrella, and 
the fruit well thinned, such machines will 
do fair work. We sold one block of 
Northwestern Greenings this year—fruit 
on the trees. The buyer shook the apples 
down on the sod, picked out the best and 
sold them at once at a fair price. I hear 
of a man who seems to sell all his fruit in 
this way. He shakes it all down on the 
ground, picks out the best for immediate 
sale for cooking, and leaves the rest for 
hogs to clean up. He says that taking 
out the cost of hand picking he makes as 
much this way as he could through hand 
picking and expensive packages. The cost 
of picking is heavy. Years ago I picked 
apples from sun to sun at $1.50 a day. 
Now we pay $4 a day for an eight-hour 
day, and the pickers often come in their 
own cars. Yet this seems to be only about 
half what painters, plumbers and some 
other workers get. 
***** 
The world is changing rapidly. In our 
own business of farming changes are be¬ 
ing forced upon us which, if we are not 
careful, will sweep us off our hills. All 
these thousands of experimenters and re¬ 
search workers are discovering new things 
or new methods so fast that we cannot 
keep np with them. I have an idea that 
they are driving some of our farmers too 
fast, and turning farming from a recog¬ 
nized practice into an experiment. I have 
just been reading a new book, “Green 
Thursday,” by Julia Peterkin. It is a 
set of sketches of present-day life among 
the planation negroes of South Carolina. 
It is remarkable for its simplicity and ac¬ 
curate pictures of the everyday life of a 
negro tenant family. Here are Killdee the 
negro, Rose his wife, Missie the girl, Mike 
the mule, Son the dog, and black babies. 
The red rooster picked out the baby’s eye. 
There is one story of Killdee and his corn 
crop which many of us might take to 
heart. With Killdee, like the rest of us 
who farm on old land, the fertilizer prob¬ 
lem was a hard one. One night at the 
store Killdee heard a fertilizer agent de¬ 
claiming about his particular brand. Fish 
scrap was the basis of it. The agent told 
how great ships sailed out and caught 
millions of fish in nets. These were dried 
and ground, mixed with chemicals and 
made into a wonderful fertilizer. This 
agent must have talked eloquently. Kill¬ 
dee saw it all in imagination and he con¬ 
cluded that here was his way to save the 
fertilizer bill and grow rich. He thought 
it out before the fire w'here his wife was 
cooking a catfish stew. He spent much 
time in the swamp catching catfish in 
traps, until he had enough to put one fish 
in each hill of corn. This was carrying 
out the wise white man’s plan, and Kill¬ 
dee went around bragging about the won¬ 
derful corn crop he had coming. But that 
very night every dog for miles around 
came into Killdee’s cornfield and proceed¬ 
ed to dig up the catfish. And in digging 
the fish they dug np the corn! A dog 
will ruin a dollar’s worth of corn to get a 
five-cent fish. Of course if Killdee had 
been a student of history he would have 
known that the Pilgrims were obliged to 
watch their cornfields day and night in 
order to keep the wolves and Indian dogs 
away. lie followed an experiment with¬ 
out knowing where it would lead—and it 
led him wrong. I have an idea that some 
of us who think we rank far above Kill¬ 
dee in science and sense have made nearly 
as bad a mistake in some of our experi¬ 
ments, if we would only admit it. But 
the pickers have come down out of the 
trees and are opening their dinner pails. 
Bet’s ride down with that load of apples 
and see what our folks have for dinner. 
I don’t know what the bill of fare will be, 
but we have absorbed so many violet rays 
from this sunshine that almost anything 
will taste good. ir. w. c. 
An Oregon man was trying to sell a 
horse. The animal was broken-winded 
but sleek. The owner trotted him around 
for inspection and bringing him back to 
the pi’ospect he stroked the horse’s back 
and remarked, “Hasn’t he a lovely coat?” 
The prospect removed his pipe and said, 
as he looked at the heaving flanks of the 
animal: “Yeah, his coat’s all right, but 
I don’t like his pants.”—Everybody’s 
Magazine. 
At any rate, this sunny hill suits me 
today. The children have picked a few 
apples, and now are playing beside the big 
stone wall. Many of the children of other 
generations were driven like little slaves' 
to pick up the thousands of stones which 
make up this wall. They were driven to 
this work at times when they should have 
been at play, and their grandchildren to¬ 
day will show some defect in character ns 
a result of all this stone picking. For, as 
life has turned out, these old walls are 
now only a useless encumbrance. Where 
children of former generations worked out 
their young lives in building a stone heap, 
my children now sit in the sun and play. 
I am told how, many years ago, some 
local preacher who thought he had some 
vision of the future, told his young people 
that in coming years these big stone walls 
would stand as monuments to labor, and 
how coming generations would bless them 
for their work. Well, the years have 
g.one, and the “coming generation” has 
arrived. Do we bless those old workers 
for erecting this monument to labor? I 
have not heard of it. These stone walls 
make my fields so small that I cannot 
plow and harrow them economically, and 
I could plant at least 300 more trees if 
these monuments were under ground. 
Only the children, absorbing violet rays 
from the sun on these old walls, consider 
them of any value. 
***** 
Two big gray heads appear on the hill 
slope. Tom and Broker, the big horses, 
have come up for another load of ap¬ 
ples. James is driving them along the 
zig-zag road which runs like a deep wrin¬ 
kle along the face of the hill. The pick¬ 
ers are perched on ladders, taking off the 
big globes of dark red. They pick into 
bags slung around the neck. These bags, 
when filled, are poured gently into bushel 
hampers. This makes a package easy to 
handle and well fitting into the wagon 
body. The drops are picked up separately 
and sorted into two grades. More than 
half of them will go as “pie apples”— 
really the best bargain for those who 
know how to use an apple knife properly. 
There one habit about Baldwin that 
culture and spraying and breeding cannot 
work out of his system. When he gets 
ripe he quits. Ben Davis and Winesap 
will hang to the tree with both hands 
long after their work is done, but Bald¬ 
win gives way when his cheek grows red. 
Sometimes when our pickers move the 
ladder just a little, half a dozen Bald¬ 
wins will come tumbling down. They are 
like Davy Crockett’s coon : “Don’t shoot! 
I’ll come down!” Old Ben Davis will 
hang to his perch and tell the picker: “If 
you want me you must come up and pick 
me off.” The original Baldwin tree stand¬ 
ing alone in the New England forest be¬ 
trayed itself to the world by the red car¬ 
pet of fruit which it threw down upon 
the ground all around it. I wish oxir 
scientists could stiffen the spine and the 
fingers of Baldwin and McIntosh, so as to 
make them hang onto their perch. One 
great value of the new Cortland is that its 
parent, Ben Davis, has given his child 
something of this ability to hang on. I 
have no doubt that the pioneer blood of 
old Ben Davis will be used to produce 
some of the greatest apples of the future. 
The blood of the Light Brahma chicken 
has been used in promoting most of the 
so-called American breeds of poultry. 
Few care to keep pure Light Brahmas 
now, but their blood worked out in proper 
combination has done about as much as 
anything to change poultry keeping in 
this country. . 
***** 
I am not much of a hand to climb B 
