Cañon City record., 1906-08-09

| Work They Will Do Themselves-Ths
Eyes of Men Farmers to Be Opened.
TWO bachelor girls of New Yorl
and their mother have started ar
| 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 far 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.
l HS OtllCI dSIG Will IlSludC a pi6 NSSS-
table garden, a strawberry bed and a
scrap of pasture for the horse. Eventu-
ally they will have a greenhouse. They
keep hens enough to supply their own
table. They hired a man to do the plow-
ing and hoe the potatoes. The rest theJ
expect to do themselves.
81 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
BOO inhabitants. There is one factory
there.
Before that came it was = farming
village The farms are ali 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 vacation In the
summer and 60 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 Tcrryyille 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.
Nov, don't blame a man who has
always lived on farm and farmed in
the old-fashioned, unscientifc way for
wanting to get into town and go to work
in mill. 1t is another stage in his evo-
luton. But il leaves an opportunity for
the scientific farmer, the educated farmer
who farms with brains.
THAT sort of person is one who has
i got done 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 1aSCltlatlOn III tne llic WHICH thS
owner of the place abandoned to go to
work in a woolen 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.
}, T believe that every year will see
more and more educated young men and
women turning to scientific farming fo1
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
specialties-fruit, butter, mushrooms
, violets-all sorts of things, and ship them
straight to customers. He won't have
very much money, but he will have a:
much at the end of the year as he had
on his salary in the city. He will be
free from the strain and grind OF city
life; he won't be afraid of being fred al
forty, and he will be his own boss"