Shiner gazette. [volume] (Shiner, Tex.) 1893-current, 1909-03-04
A Real Experiment
Station.

ing. 1t is not the purpose of the
government to make model
crops. There is no idea of MAX
ing a show place. The gardens
are workshops, in which experts
study garden and orchard pests,
try out new species of plants and
domesticate them, adding new
resources to the country's list
of money makers, etc. They
are, in reality, experiment
farms. But in order not to con-
fuse them with the state expert
ment stations the name cooper
ative garden has been adopted.
The work that Professor
Green and his men are doing at
Brownsville indicates what the
cooperative garden would do
here. The war department turn
ed the old fort over to the agri-
cultural department. early in the
summer of 1907. The expert
ment garden was located on the
old cavalry drift ground, be-
tween the artillery barracks and
the river. The piece is fifty
acres in size. 1t has been pack
ed as hard as iron by the hoofs
of the country's war horses for
many years. Neglected since
the negro troops were with
drawn from the post, it had in
the meantime grown up to Ber-
muda grass. Professor Green
and his men cut the grass-two
tons to the acre-raked it up
and burned it. Then they plow-
ed the ground, disced and har-
rowed it, turned water onto it
and planted.
The little tract contains more
varieties of plant life than any
other of equal size in America,
| suppose. Fifteen hundred diff
ferent varieties of vegetables,
trees, forage plants, flowers,
vines, ETC., are represented there.
A careful card index record of
each specimen is kept in the Of
flee of the director. He can tell
you at a minutes notice, when
each item was planted and what
success or failure it has made,
according to observations taken
at frequent intervals, down to
date. He has beans from the
arid districts of India that are
expected to be a valuable food
crop for the Southwest Texas
regions that cannot easily be wa
tered. He has plants brought
from all over the world, contrib
uted without cost to Texas by
the federal government. Many
of these, like the Indian beans,
are calculated to facilitate the
making of farm homes in dis
tricts that, for want of water,
cannot produce the crops native
to the soil. He is making a
study of soils, waters, trees and
insect pests. When he learns
how to get the better of a bug
that destroys quantities of gar
den truck, and that the garden
ers don't know how to get rid
of, he tells them. It's mighty |
practical work - work that |
makes and saves dollars. Work,
too, that the average farmer or
fruit grower has neither the
time, the money nor the expert
knowledge to do for himself.
OBEYING THE BIBLICAL IN
JUNCTION.
1t struck me that a man who
knows how to do such things
could make a very strong poem,
on the order of the Biblical in
junction to turn swords into
pruning hooks, after looking
into the old barracks, now filled
with plows, discs, harrows,
spades, forks, shovels and hun
dred other tools of peaceful in
dustry. The contrast was made
all the more vivid by the recol-
lection that the last military oc-
of the old fort were a
lot of + riley, disorderly black
men, who, because they were de-
prlved of normal, natural, use
full labor, ran amuck in the town
with guns in their hands.
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