Cameron County press. [volume] (Emporium, Cameron County, Pa.) 1866-1922, 1906-08-16
BACHELOR GIRLS
FARMING 1T.
An Experiment on One of the Berkshire
Hilltops.

They are Trying IL They Can Live From
the Proceeds of Two Acres-Most of the
Work They Will Do ThemseIvss-The
Eyes of Men Farmers to he Opened.
| Two bachelor girls of New York
and their mother have started an
y experiment this summer to see
if they can actually live from
the proceeds of two acres of land. The
land Is situated on one of the Berkshire
hilltops, near the village of Terryville,
not tar from Waterbury, Conn. Last
SUMMER was the first they spent there,
and they sold fifty dollars worth of gar
den truck, besides supplying their own
table.
This spring they started early. They
have ploughed and planted the whole
two acres, half of it to potatoes. They
expect to raise five hundred bushels of
potatoes, to sell them for one dollar a
bushel, and to clear $25o or $500 from
that acre. They are now selling hotbed
radishes and lettuce, and have sold 1000
tomato plants raised under cheesecloth
from seeds planted in April.
The other acre will include big vege-
table garden, strawberry bed and a
scrap of pasture for the horse. Eventu-
ally they will have greenhouse, They
keep hens enough to supply their own
table. They hired man to do the plow
ing and hoe the potatoes. The rest they
expect to do themselves.
q believe" said one of them, "that a
great source of modest prosperity is be-
ing wasted by the absence of market gar
dening in the neighborhood of the
smaller places. Terryville has about
1900 inhabitants. There is one factory
there.
Before that came it was farming
village. The farms are all there yet, but
the farmers are all working in the fac
tory. There are no vegetable gardens
in that village and no market gardens
around it.
"They raise nothing on their farms but
hay. They will take a vacation in the
summer and go and do their haying, or
they will hire man to do it for them /;
but as they do nothing for the land the
hay crop gets poorer every year.
"At Terryville and Waterbury all the
garden truck comes in from New York,
and is, of course, expensive and not
fresh. With great stretches of unculti
vated land all around, the people eat
canned vegetables. There is some mar
ket gardening around Hartford, but
there, too, supplies are drawn from New
York 1t is so all through that region
and other regions like it.
"Now, | don't blame a man who has
always lived on farm and farned in
the old-fashioned, unscientihc way for
wanting to get into town and go to work
in mill 1t is another stage in his evo-
lution.' But it leaves an opportunity for
the scientific farmer, the educated farmer
who farms with brains.
"That sort of person is one who has
got dc c!.e with cities, who has been
through the MILL who has had enough,
and longs to get out of the treadmill
of city life. Such person finds inter
est and fascination in the life which the
owner of the place abandoned to go to
work in a woollen mill. | believe that
all the small farming of the East, which
is practically only market gardening and
raising of specialties is going to pass
into the hands of this class.
Il believe that every year will see
more and more educated young men and
women turning to scientific farming for
living. That sort of farmer will de-
mand more than the old fashioned one.
Books, newspapers, periodicals, bath
tub and an occasional trip to the city
will be necessaries to him.
"He will make them possible by his
better methods, both Of cultivating and
of marketing. He will raise high-grade
specialti es-fruit, butter, mushrooms,
violets- all sorts of things, and ship them
straight to customers. He won't have
very m Ich money, but he will have as
much all the end of the year as he had
on his salary in the city. He will be
free frt pm the strain and grind of city
life; he won't be afraid of being fired al
forty, and he will be his own boss"