Norwich bulletin., 1914-05-30
A REVELATION OF TIE LAST CENSUS

certain field in a wet year but prove a complete failure on the same in a dry summer. Take a season when the day air is humid. the morn warm and sticky. and soIre thirgs will make fine crops on land whereon. in a summer of brilliantly su..sainj days but coolish nights, they will hardly pay for seed and lasor
 So on and 60 on, through a whole list of varying conditions and dimiy understood causes.
 How is a common farme, who is neither a prophet nor a genius nor the seventh son of a seventh son to find out all these things in one year? or two? or five?
 He can find out some things in about five minutes. He will ind out some more in five months. + will be finding them out for fifteen years, long.
 My father worked this little ranch pretty nearly all his long lif4: hls father worked it before him; his grandfather began digging away at it a hundred and thirty years ago Eacn succeeding generation has is-hertted much of the painfully gained kno edge of the preceding, and has adfed some of it's own discovery
 And this spring, after hunc: ea and thirty years of farming by thu Farmer family, this particular John farmer the fourth. would cheerfuliy give a whole lot of old boots to kne~ just exactly how to manage his south lot," which didn't do well in grass, last year; which didn't do well in oats the year before; or in corn the year before that; or in potatoes, the las- time I tried them; or in anything ex- eept shepherds purse and pigweed and ragweed and a few similar things for which I have no immediate use I've tried stable manure on it, and I've tried comercia1 fertilizers, and i've tried lime, and I've tried following Tests show that the soil is not unduly sour; analysis reports a fair amount of plant-food in it: observation proves that 1t is not lacking in humus. Un- auestionably it is all ready and will if properly asked and its interest judjciously stimulated But whate That's the question which l haven't answered after ten years of trial, and which it may take me ten years more to solve.
 Certainly l am not going to g;%e up just because the nut is an exty4 hard one to crack. If the nut-cracBlr won't work. then there's the hazznner. If that's too light, there's a s,sdge ham, me. If nothing else win fo the job,
 
 The point is that pTe got to keep on trying, firstLoIe thing and then another. And, as a farmer can thor oughly try only one thing year, 1t takes a mighty long time to exhaust the category of tests he may have to make before he stunlbles on to the right thing.
 One reason why the farmers of the older continent of Europe grow better crops, as a rule than we Americans. is that they stay by their farms longer and come to know them better. When took hold of this place. I was able to do more with it than any stranger could have done, because l had the experience of preceding generations to guide me. I can do still more with it, now, because I have since added to the stock good many years of perso nal experience. The average European farmer usually succeeds to the farm of his ancestors and spends the whole of his own life on it. He coud know it, and is therefore able to make it do for him what it would do for no one else
 "What is the secret of your wonder. fui lawns? asked an impatient Amer ican of an old English gardener, as he looked over the expanse of smooth shayen, velvety sward on which the latter had been working 'sWhy there's no secret, was the answer. "Its perfectly simple and easy. All you have to do is to put on plenty of fine sheep manure and keep it close moved for about three hundred years!'
 If it takes three hundred years for a series of expert English gardeners to get a really f1rst-class, A No. One, bang-up lawn. isn't it a bit absurd to expect the average farmer to gnin