The Cairo bulletin. (Cairo, Ill.) 1???-1928, 1906-07-29

l
Eyes of Men Farmers To he Opened.
bachelor girls of New Yor
/ and their mother have started a
4 4 experiment this summer to Sc
| if they can actually live fror
the proceeds of two acres of land. Tn
land is situated on one of the Berkshir
hilltops, near the village of Terryville
not far from Waterbury, Conn. Las
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 $2so or 5000 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 the}
expect to do themselves.
Il believe" said one Of them, "that
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 a 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 viii take a vacation in the
summer and go and do their haying, or
they viii hire a man to do it for them
but as they DO nothing for the land the
nay crop gets poorer every year
AT Terryville and Waterbury all the |
garden truck comes in from New York,
md is, OF course, expensive and not
fresh. With great stretches OF unculti-
'ated land all around, the people ca,
AIMED vegetables. There is some mar
let gardening around Hartford, but
here, too, supplies are drawn from New
York. 1t is so all through that region
nd other regions like it.
Now, I don't blame man who has
always lived on a farm and farmed in
he old-fashioned, unscientiie way for
wanting to get into town and go to work
"a mill. 1t is another stage in his evo-
ution. But it leaves an opportunity for
he scientific farmer the educated farmer
Who farms with brains.
'That sort of person is one who has
yot done with cities, who has been
through the mill, who has had enough,
md longs to get out of the treadmill
# city life. Such a person finds inter
st and fascination in the life which the
'wner of the place abandoned to go to
work in a woollen mill. believe that
II the small farming of the East, which
S practically only market gardening and
aising of specialties is going to pass
nto the hands of this class.
Il believe that every year will see
1ore and more educated young men and
women turning to scientific farming for
living. That sort of farmer will de-
land more than the old fashioned one.
Books, newspapers, periodicals., bath
ub and an occasional trip to the city
viii be necessaries to him.
"He viii make them possible by his
'etter methods, both of cultivating and
# marketing. He will raise high-grade
pecialties-fruit, butter, mushrooms,
riolets-all sorts of things, and ship them
traight to customers. He won't have
-ery much money, but he will have as
much at the end of the year as he had
m his salary in the city. He will be
rec from the strain and grind of city
ife; he won't be afraid Of being fred at
orty, and he will be his own boss"