The Baltimore County union. [volume] (Towsontown, Md.) 1865-1909, 1903-01-03
SOME MEN WHO RIDE HOBBIES.

y Speciality, no matter what his OCCupa
4 ZION or profession. While in farmin
i IT'S necessary to raise-at least littl
q OF good many things, and, in fact
g 90 more or less general farming, it i
a the man who learns one particula
q branch of the business better than an,
4 one else in his community, and thei
b pushes it for all it is worth wht
z makes the most money out of it.
This specializing becomes more anc
4 more pronounced. Each doctor ha:
I his speciality, and many refuse tc
treat anything outside of their owr
particular lines. The farmer, how.
III EVER, cannot be so exclusive, as a
I'm must have stock, and it takes
various crops to raise stock, and it re-
qures the use of horses to make
crops, so his line of work must be
somewhat general. This need not
, keep him from learning his favorite
branch to perfection and putting the
t main part Of his energy and thought
: in that direction.
L should ike to introduce some of
Our best men and their hobbies in this
locality. Ispeak of them as hobbies,
but, OF course, they amount to more
than this with them, because they
have become the most successful part
of their life work,
One man, Jones, is known to all as
the plum man. His farm was never
much good for cropping, so some
years ago he put out large plum or
chard containing all the best varieties
and many kinds that people here had
never seen before. He then made a
complete study of spraying, pruning
and plum growing in general until he
had his business down to SO fine a
point that he is now as sure of plum
crop as are his neighbors of wheat
or corn crop. And what harvest he
has reaped this year, with all other
fruit very scarce and his trees full of
perfect beauties at So bushel Sure
ly his plums are better than the pro-
verbal political plums, which occa-
sionally drop to a favored few. He
has worked for his.
King is the honey man, and people
often wonder why his frames of honey
are filled so evenly and are always so
clean and white that they have the
appearance of being sand papered,
and how he gets the bees to put so
nearly an even pound in each one.
Ask Mr.. King and he might say
Spend as much time and work as I
have spent, and you may find out.
1t is too long a story to tell, and has
cost too much to give away"
Some men with big, rich farms
prefer to make some Of the oenera1 |
--eafn about these cOmmOneT crops |
hhat most farmers do not know as
there is about the more rare ones.
That this is true is proved by friend
Smiths success with wheat. All OF
his neighbors like to get their seed
from him, and I understand that he
shipped two carloads down into Vir-
ginia this year, SO far reaching is his
reputation for good varieties and clean
seed.
But then it is easy for him to raise
clean wheat, free from weed seed, for
he has clean land. Perhaps that
clean land is part of the secret of his
success, and who knows what time
and labor it may have cost him to get
and keep his land this way? know
that he always cuts his stubble over
once, and if necessary twice, so that
no weeds may mature seed; neither
are his fence rows devoted to the pro-
duction of fancy weed seeds, to be
scattered whichever way the wind
may blow.
Wilson, the corn man, has some
very peculiar ideas about the time OF
planting and manner of cultivation,
and in the spring you will find his
neighbors laughing an him, but later
in the season they begin to think that
maybe he is 'onto" his job after all,
and perhaps they will try his plan
as far as they know it-next time, for
he surely does get corn.
But 1 must not fail to make Mr..
Hankins known to you. He is the
man with the small, rich farm, that
looks like patchwork quilt. Little
piles of queer looking stuff that we
don't even know the names of may
be seen all over the place, even very
little corn or wheat or other crops
that go to make farm look substan'
tial in sight. What has come ovel
Hankins these last few years =? He
, used to be a sensible man and raise
good corn, wheat and oats, some o.
those chaps who run the experiment
stations and turned his farm into one
He is another man who IS laughed at
But he simply turns his back ant
laughs with his neighbors, so tha
:, they cannot see his satisfaction a
I their mirth, for his secret is also to-
good to give away. If these neigh
bors who think he is wasting his tim
3 on foolish experiments will go to hi
u house and look in the lower left-han
corner of the old walnut bookcase
:, between the family Bible and Wei
q ster's Unabridged they will find sev
= eral papers, contracts signed by som
,e of the most prominent seedmen OF tn
/ land, and, yes, down below is job
N Hankins' scrawl. What can it mean
~ Only that John is going to raj:
d 1000 pounds of kale seed at pric
a pound that fairly startles them, ar
=" if they run over the other contrac
4, they will see that if their lucky neigl
u Dor ful6lls his contracts-and he gel
'n orally succeeds in doing so-he wi
make twice as much money over b
II eighty acres as they ever have maj
over twice the amount of land. Th'
7 also used to laugh at him for raislr
n a great deal of sorghum, as he W
never seen hauling any to the mill
molasses, but when they found th
re he could dispose of forty bushels
MI IL