SOME PRACTICAL EXPERIMENTS
The Department of Agriculture at Washington, also Cornell University
and various other schools publish special studies and monographs of
different branches. For some a small charge is made, but they are
mostly distributed free. Many of them are very valuable. The United
States Department's pamphlet on the Diseases of the Violet is a
notable example. The average person does not know how these can be
obtained or even that they exist.
The Department's Year Books are most interesting reading, and both
its Professors and the state colleges will answer particular
questions of citizens.
These and the various United States and State Experiment Station
publications will serve instead of most books (except this one), if
properly filed, indexed, and crossindexed so that you can readily
turn to all the information on a given subject--on bugs, for
instance, before the insects have harvested your crop.
I am trying only to suggest things, not to advise, nor to induce my
readers to try to do anything that they don't like or have no
capacity for. It is difficult to make people understand that.
One reader of this book, a dear creature, wrote her experience for a
Crafts magazine. She got the acres, built her house, and raised one
fine crop of--swans? nuts grafted on wild trees? partridge berries?
No--three tons of hay!
She called it "Three Acres and Starving"; I called it "Three
Acres and Stupidity." She didn't eat the hay, and the Editor
wouldn't publish my reply.
Everybody raises hay and potatoes; so don't you raise any unless for
your own use.
Potatoes are a laborious crop, requiring constant care, manuring,
cutting the seed eyes (on which there is much uncertain lore),
hilling up or down according to drainage and rainfall, spraying with
Pyrox or dusting with Paris green, and, neither least nor last, bug
hunting.
The seed is expensive, but for your own use you may plant from
whatever seed, otherwise wasted, may grow on the potato vine, on the
tops of the plants. The crop will be small potatoes and all kinds of
varieties, which won't sell in the market but which make each dinner
a surprise party. You may strike a new and improved strain, though
there are over a thousand varieties of potato listed already. New
creations of merit bring good returns, and 'tis the enterprising
experimenter that reaps the honor and the harvest, and he is worthy
of his reward.
To select the most productive plants and breed again from these is,
however, a more promising profit plan. Even then don't plant the
tubers unless you will take the pains to soak the seed potatoes in
scab preventer. If you won't, likely you will raise mostly scab, and
the spores thereof will spoil your ground for potatoes for years.
It costs little in money to make it--half a pint of formalin to
fifteen gallons of water. Not guessed but measured gallons. Then
soak for an hour and a half by the Ingersoll. Don't reckon that one
little hour or a few will do just as well. With one hour they will
be under-done and spotty, with three over-done and weakly.
There is lots to be discovered yet about "the spuds." Sawdust is an
excellent mulch for them, as for small fruits. When you store any
seeds to plant, put carbolic moth balls with them. It checks insects
and mice and helps to protect the planted seeds from birds.
In a general way, with potatoes and with other things that you want
good and plenty, get specific directions and follow them. Most
people won't read directions; more can't follow them. Those people
have their knives out for "book farmers and professors," but you
can't improve on experience and experiment by the light of laziness
or of nature.
A delicate jelly is made out of the red outer pulp of rose berries.
It would be romantic to develop a Rose fruit from those seed pods,
as the peach was developed from the almond. We have invented
stranger fruits than that, such as the Logan-berry and the pomato.
But there is better chance for profit in doing the old things
better, especially when the experiment costs little or nothing.
You can have a strawberry garden on your roof or even on a balcony.
This need not be costly. Clinch all the nails on the inside of a
stout barrel. Bore half a dozen two-inch holes in the bottom, or put
in a layer of stones, for drainage. Bore a row of eight holes about
eight inches from the bottom of the barrel and about eight inches
apart. Eight inches above this bore a second row of holes
"staggered," and a third eight inches above those. Pile several old
tomato cans with perforated bottoms one on the other in the center
of the barrel: these should be the height of the barrel and placed
upright in its middle. This is the conductor down which water should
be poured at intervals before the soil gets quite dry. Fill the
barrel with soil made of one half loam and one half well-rotted
manure. Be sure the manure is not fresh. A little bone meal is a
good addition.
Now plant the first row of strawberry plants ("ever-bearing" are
best, though they don't ever-bear). Put each plant inside, spread
the roots, and pull the leaves of each out through one of the holes.
Press the soil down firmly around each root. Repeat the process for
the other two rows; fill the barrel and set say six plants on the
top. That will give you thirty plants, which should grow ten to
twenty-five quarts of fine berries, or more. The illustration makes
the holes twelve inches apart--for big leafy plants.
If there are any more, those will be you. Anyhow, you will know a
lot about strawberries at the end of the season. Other things can be
grown in the same way.
Better than growing vegetables, or where dry land can't be obtained,
is to raise some crop like water cress that usually comes from a
distance.
Often an otherwise poor season will help a specialty. One year wet
weather jumped the price of mint and it sold at double prices. Hot,
dry weather is required to make it produce its best.
Most of the mint produced in this country for peppermint oil is
grown in Michigan. More than 4000 acres are reported from a single
county. Mint oil is worth about $3.50 a pound and costs about a
dollar to produce. Nice bright dried leaves sell for about 15 cent
a pound.
The production of mint is sometimes as high as fifty pounds of oil
to the acre. The bulk of it is grown on marshlands, which a few
years ago were nowhere worth more than a few dollars an acre. The
mint is sent to the manufacturers, where it is purified and made
into flavoring extract or used in chewing gum, etc.
Why should we, with our infinite variety of climates, soils, and
labor, import from England the coarser varieties of seeds of the
cabbage family, savoy, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, or kale? We owe
England enough already for the seed of Liberty we got from her.
California now supplies some seed for onions, carrots, parsnips, and
a few others. The finest cauliflower comes mostly from Denmark now.
Turnip seed, too, mangel-wurzel and swedes, onion, pea, bean,
carrot, parsnip, radish, and beet seeds could be grown here by the
same skill, care, and training as they are grown abroad.
An interesting method of forcing plants by the use of hot water
baths is described in _La Nature_ (Paris), by Henri Coupin. The
process is much simpler than others now in use and may be employed
by any one who has a small greenhouse, no expert treatment being
necessary. Says Mr. Coupin:
"Most trees in our countries undergo a period of rest, during which
all growth appears to be suspended. Branches do not enlarge and the
buds on them remain as they are. They do not arouse from their
torpor until spring, first, because they then find the conditions
necessary for their development, and again, because, during the
period of rest, chemical changes have taken place in them. These are
indispensable, because if they did not occur, the trees, even in the
most favorable conditions, would not open their buds. For example,
plant branches that have quite recently dropped their leaves, in a
warm greenhouse. They will not bud; but make the same experiment at
the end of several months and the buds will appear.
"There are several ways of shortening this period of rest, some of
which are rather odd. The best known is the process of
etherification, which has been so much discussed recently, and which
consists in placing the plants to be forced in the vapor of ether or
chloroform for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Afterwards when
placed in a hothouse, the branches begin to develop almost
immediately.
"A very ingenious botanist, Hans Molisch, professor in the
University of Prague, has devised a method of forcing, simpler still
and quite as effective. It consists in plunging the branches into
warm water during a time that varies with the species. The best
method is to plunge the plants in a reservoir of warm water, head
downward, without moistening the roots, which would injure them.
After a certain time, the plants are withdrawn, turned right side up
with care, and placed in a greenhouse, where they develop at once.
"The duration of the warm bath should be nine to twelve hours at
most. The best temperature is 30 degree to 35 degree [86 degree to
95 degree F] . . . That is to say, in the majority of cases, one may
simply employ the water available in hothouses, which is just at the
proper temperature. The process is thus at the disposal of all
gardeners.
"It should be said that the good effects of the hot baths are
confined to the parts actually immersed and do not extend to the
whole plant. Thus, on the same stem we may see developing only the
branches that have been treated with the bath, while the others
remain torpid. This is easy to verify with the lilac or the willow.
"If Lobner is to be believed, we may substitute for the water bath
one of steam. He has obtained good results with the lily of the
valley. The thing is possible, but the method used by Molisch is
more practical.
"How shall we explain the good effect of warm water on branches in a
resting state? We are absolutely ignorant of its mechanism, as we
are also in the case of etherification. But if we knew everything,
science would be no longer amusing!"--Condensed, from _THE LITERARY
DIGEST._
There are many new uses for water: It will not be long before every
truck and every commercial flower garden will have overhead
irrigation. This is merely gas pipes ("seconds" rejected for blow
holes or porosity are usually used) supported on posts say six feet
above the ground. They are usually placed parallel about fifty feet
apart, which will make four to the acre square, and have a single
row of holes and a handle on each pipe, so that the spray can be
turned in either direction; with a high-water pressure, often
supplied by gravity, they may be farther apart with larger holes.
These not only have saved us from fear of drought, but they supply
the moisture in the natural manner and at the right time and
increase fertility to an astonishing degree.
When you take a shower bath yourself, that is overhead irrigation.
The gasoline, kerosene, or heavy oil one man farm tractor, so made
that it can be used to plow, to climb a side hill, to run a saw or a
pump, is the coming factor in garden and farm advance. Huge fortune
awaits the first manufacturer who will standardize it, cheapen it,
and specialize on it. The horse is the greatest care and the
greatest risk on the little farm. He costs more than a tractor
would, he is eating his head off half the time, he can't he worked
overtime without injury, not even as much as a man can be; all too
soon he dies, more missed than any member of the family.
When this is popularized the "Three Acres" can well be extended to
five.