Waterbury evening Democrat., 1904-08-03
HAY CROP or NEW YORK.
Is Estimated at Fifty Thou sand Dollars.

New York city's hay crop, public and private, which is now being harvested. must be worth fully a million of dol- lars
 The city alone harvests hay from the many hundred acres of park land, and the crop must be worth at least S50,000. though the park department receives no such price for it, says the Sun.
 All over the upper part of The Bronx and in other semi-rural boroughs, es- pecially the horoughs of Richmond and Queens, having occupies considera- ble number of the inhabitants in the last week of June and the first week of July. The abundant rains of some weeks ago in effect made the crop, and hay is running from one and half to three tons to the acre.
 Having gives the suburban regions 8 new touch of the country. Even where there are no actual farming operations going on there is usually some one with a mower, often the worse for wear. ready to cut hay for his neigh bors
 A good deal of the city hay crop is cut with old-fashioned instruments. The cradle, like the horse car, has per- sisted in New York, although 1t excites ridicule in the real country. Much of the local hay crop is cut with scythes, and even the sickle is occasionally used
 1t is often hard for the local hay grower to find skilled haymaker, and wages are so high in the suburbs that haying is not profitable. Some suburb antics who own acres of hay finds that 1t barely pays to cut and store the crop.
 For this reason most of the local hay crop is sold standing at absurdly low prices. Half dozen charitable or institutions in The Bronx, with large grounds upon which hay grows, are glad to turn 1t over to friends or neigh bors at nominal rates
 Tn some such cases all sorts of per sons, men, women and children, are | pressed into service at the harvest, and l there are even gleaners,3 as in old l Scriptural times, who follow the hay makers about the fields to gather lit- tie harvest of their own Up at Wake ! field the other day there worked in a single hay field policeman, the wife I of a neighboring shopkeeper, several l hired haymakers and tiny four-year- I old volunteer, a chubby, black-eyed lit tie girl in an immense straw hat, who l manfully turned the hay with full I grown wooden rake.
 Suburban haymaking is sometimes made the excuse for frolic and picnic to which urban friends are invited Then, you may see merry girls in smart I gowns and rough straw hats playing al | harvesting. The picnic ends in sup per by moonlight among the haycocks with profusion of sights and sounds and odors that create the illusion oi ! the real country.
 Tn some of the remoter parts of The I Bronx the serious hay harvest is thai of the slat marshes, where men witt scythes and cradles venture far out upon the tidal plains and gather rank crop, which is valued not only as { food for beasts, but is much used by the market gardeners of the region fol mulching.
 Part of the crop is usually stored al
 winter long upon bits of fast land, ant
 nothing gives the wintry landscape O
 the marshes so warm suggestion o
 summer as these amber mounds
 smooth soft and deliciously rich il
 tone, melting into the general colorini
 of the level ,shorn grass
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