HOUSE AND GARDEN 
August, 
1914 
Farmer-boy and mechanic, a necessary combination, was successfully solved in the helper 
agent offered me twenty 
acres at $75 per acre, and 
I finally agreed to take it. 
When it came to mak¬ 
ing out the papers, the 
agent, in spite of his ver¬ 
bal agreement, refused to 
sell me more than fifteen 
acres at that price, think¬ 
ing, perhaps, that he could 
force me to pay more. I 
refused to do so, how¬ 
ever, and purchased the 
fifteen acres, paying cash 
for it. 
I had spent nearly a 
year looking around for a 
suitable place, and during 
this time we had been liv¬ 
ing in a rented house, for 
which we paid $30 per month. This was 5 per cent on more than 
$7,000, so it would seem that we might just as well be paying 
that much, if necessary, on a mortgage on a house which we 
could own and be paying for gradually, and we would then have 
something to show for the money. 
For several months I was busily engaged upon plans, which 
I then took to a competent builder in the town near by and had 
him make an estimate. I had fixed $4,500 or $5,000 as the limit 
of cost of the house, and as his estimate came to more than this, 
I was forced to cut down the size of my plans. I finally made 
a contract with the builder for the erection of the house and for 
a barn which was to cost a little over a thousand dollars, and a 
chicken house which would accommodate 100 chickens, and 
started him at work on them. 
I joined a building and loan association, and from it borrowed 
$3,500, giving a mortgage on my land and buildings as security. 
I also borrowed $2,000 from a bank, giving some of my life in¬ 
surance policies as security. Before matters had gone very far, 
1 found it necessary to borrow an additional $1,000 on my stocks, 
in order to keep things going. It will be seen that these sources 
provided the means to erect the necessary buildings. The loan 
from the building and loan association requires payments of 
about $50 per month, and will become paid up in about six years. 
I purchased my land in October. It had been already seeded 
in wheat by the tenant, 
and I agreed to pay him 
about $7 per acre for the 
seed, fertilizer and labor 
he had expended in seed¬ 
ing it. This appeared a 
good bargain, for, even if 
the crop should make only 
20 bushels per acre, ten 
acres should bring in 
about $200, and I knew 
that 20 bushels was con¬ 
sidered a small yield. 
The farm was a por¬ 
tion of a large farm 
which had been worked 
probably since the coun¬ 
try was first settled, some¬ 
where in the sixteen-hun¬ 
dreds. It was located 
about a mile from the 
barn of the homestead, 
The onjy crop on the profit side of the ledger, potatoes, did exceed expectations by an encourag¬ 
ing margin the first year 
and although naturally 
fertile and promising 
land, it was too far from 
the source of the ordinary 
farm fertilizer to have re¬ 
ceived much during the 
200 or 250 years that it 
had been under cultiva¬ 
tion. As a result, it was 
just naturally run down, 
and my wheat crop for 
the year tells the tale. It 
is too much to expect 
from even the best land, 
that it will continue to 
give up crops year after 
year for over two cen¬ 
turies without a protest. 
About two acres of my 
land were swamp and 
beach land that were not cultivable, and I occupied about two 
more in putting up the house and barn and in chicken yards, and 
two acres were devoted to my garden and trucking experiments, 
so that there was left only about nine acres of the wheat. My 
general plan in regard to the farm was to try chicken raising 
and truck farming, raising crops which would bring in a large 
return per acre, thus making up for the small acreage by inten¬ 
sive methods of culture. I thought that for the first year I would 
try out two or three crops, such as lima beans, celery and onions, 
with a view to selecting that one which seemed most profitable 
and suitable for succeeding years. 
Early in April I had about two acres of the wheat plowed 
up for a garden, and forthwith started a liberal allowance of all 
that seemed desirable for the home garden. The rows through 
the wheat, where the shocks of corn had been when the wheat 
was sown, were still vacant, so 1 had them plowed and planted 
in potatoes. I had read somewhere — perhaps in an agricultural 
college report—that lima beans were a profitable crop, paying 
sometimes as much as $1,500 to the acre. That seemed attractive, 
so I planted enough lima beans to make about a half mile had 
they been in one row. The poles alone for these, which I had to 
purchase, cost about $10. For some of the beans I used ordinary 
poles, while for others I used wires at top and bottom, on which 
binder twine was strung for the beans to climb. This system 
was quite satisfactory, 
but it incurred more 
trouble and expense than 
the ordinary pole. Quite 
heavy poles, placed about 
30 feet apart, were re¬ 
quired to support the 
wires, which were gal¬ 
vanized and about the 
size of ordinary telegraph 
wire. I planted several 
thousand feet of onion 
seed, about 150 hills of 
melons, and set out 1,000 
asparagus crowns, and 
enough asparagus seed to 
make about one-fourth of 
an acre. I propose event¬ 
ually to set out several 
acres in asparagus, as it 
is said to pay from $15° 
to $500 per acre. But the 
