Norwich bulletin., 1912-06-22

suggestion, when l was planting those crops in May, that we were to have a recrudescence of winter in June. A little old fashioned guess work did enable me to save few hundred tomato and pepper plants by nasty recourse to box and bran-b bag covers. But even they are looking more tor less sickly,-have lost the cheerful hope fitness which they showed when first set out into a too cold world.
 In my truck patch, the rows of let tuce are thick and of fair color. But the rows of spinach, just beside them, show only here and there 8 plant. Dit to with the beets. While every lettuce seed sown seems to have germinated and lived. A little radish seed, soWn early under glass, came up finely and grew into handsome radishes. The rest rest of the half-pOund, Sown in the open at the proper time and in ground analytically and eXperimentally shown suitable for radishes, hasn't produced a single plant A very few tiny leaves have appeared at intervals only to be eaten off instantly by the turnip flea beetles.
 Green peas, which started promising
 
 two or three weeks. Two years ago l began picking for market on June 12. This yeap there wasn't a 'Slat' pod an inch long visible on the vines June 12. The larger vines are barely holding their own; half dozen long rows of smaller ones, planted for late crop, are turning yellow and wilter- ing.
 Early set cabbage plants gre dying by the dozen, apparently for no req son except that they're too discouraged to live.
 In my seed beds cauifower and celery have either refused to germinate or have been destroyed by some mys- terious blight or bacterium before have managed to get their heads above ground stubbornly refuse to grow any further In three seed beds, two un- der cheese cloth and one in the open, l may have a thousand or two celery plants still alive. They have been up three weeks or more and the biggest of them may be an inch high now. At present rates of progress, it looks as if some or them might become settable by September Though I don't want to be over -sanguine about that!
 Winter squashes came up promptly and rankiy. Of my melon hills single sickly stem is visible in about one out of ten.
 To sum up, lettuce, squashes, onions. asparagus and chickWeed seem to be doing finely For the rest my gardens resemble 8 vegetable hospital.
 Now haven't been telling you all this to whimper over or snivel about. Nor to bespeak your sympathy. Thank you, Pm not in the market for that, either. It is simply to suggest to you, from the one experience which is closest to me and which l can write about most intelligently. that old Step mother Nature is still on the job and that neither machinery nor science has yet found a way to meet all her whims.
 I'm rather hoping and expecting that, some time or other, science will do even that miraculous thing. But it hasn't been done in 1912. And the fellow who intimates that it has been is talking through his hat" The simple truth is that We farmers in this part of the country are having phenomenally backward season, with an unusually vigorous irruption Of bacterial and insect pests. Science wasn't able to forewarn us of it, nor has she any practical fOrmulae by which we may overcome it. Nor is there any 1 cure in machinery" We still have
 to take the weather as it comes and the seasons as they go.
 Generally Nature is fairly good to us,-kinder than our fellow beings, the middlemen, anyway. Ours isn't the ] only calling which has it's bad years. We ! can all remember times when business
 men were going into bankruptcy like 1 panic stricken sheep into a ditch | years when banks by the hundreds had l to close their doors and liquidate. Take | it "by and large" our business is the | steadiest and surest there is, with the | least risk and the rarest threat of l failure. But all risk and all danger
 of failure have not yet been eliminated | from it. We still have to take our | chances, sometimes to take pretty slim 1 chances.
 1 Yet there are compensations for us | even in defeat You remember the 1 scared lady aboard ship in a night