The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1914-01-07
ROOT CROPS IN
 NEW ENGLAND
By George French,

I f ' | l
 It takes a pretty worthless piece of
 land to be so poor that good crops of roots cannot be raised on it-beets,
 t4rnips and carrots as the staples. with
 parsnips radishes and the more un-i
 usual varieties according to the exact
 nature of the land and the demands of.
 the. market at hand.
 There is a steady 4market for these
 roots, and if they are Of good variety.
 well grown and properly prepared for
 the taste of the discrimating buyer. they bring good prices They must be regularly and promptly marketed The
 retail dealer or the commission man must know what he can depend upon.
 It is not good policy to happn into a= mans store whenever it is convenient
 to take load of roots to town with a.
 scrubby lot of unnamed stuff, not too
 the store promptly on time, as agreed
 on the day set, or on every day if the market is large enough to absorb that
 much, and the roots should be clean
 and neatly trimmed, uniform in size
 and regular in shape, and of such named varieties as have something dis tinctive about them, in size, shape or flavor, so that the grower will after
 time have the advantage of a trade mark This is important. There should also be some attractive label
 used, so that the buyers will get to ask
 
 for the label on the barrel from which
 the retailer serves. Then if the tex
 ture and flavor are also distinctive the grower will soon have a market for all he can raise so free to take his pro-
 duct as to almost eliminate the cost of selling. The lowest priced hand can go to market with the load, saving the time of the owner both as to going with the load and as to peddlfng it around to all the dealers when he did
 go. In this matter of good goods well
 packed, with labels, there is all the difference between profit and loss, or between just existing and being able Ito put some money in the bank every week.
 know two brothers, Danes, who went into the very heart Of the most
 rural of all the rural districts in New
 England, one of the little almost for gotten hill towns in central Massa- chusetts, as much as 25 or 30 years ago, and bought a little abandoned
 farm of some 50 or 10 acres. They had been market gardeners in the F1atbush district of what is now the Borough Of
 Brooklyn of the city of New York
 They had been Ia borers there, working ] for one of the then big gardeners of that region What they wanted of the small, rocky, barren piece of waste land up on that cold and frosty hill nobody about that region could inn agfre. The house was wreck, and the land was not thought worth pay ing taxes on- The only apparent ad- 1 vantage seemed to be the free air and lsbeing but eight miles from n good
 market.
 But the brothers went to work, grub bing out the big rocks and patching the roof of the big house so that they would not be drowned in their beds when there came storm in the night They put in a patch of cabbages, and 1 a few turnips and beets, using conn mercia1 fertilizers for the most part l The neighboring farmers laughed, and guessed how long it would be before 1 the brothers went back to F'latbush. But they were all astonished to see the good crops that were harvested the first season; but they had some more laughings when they saw the roots carefully washed, trimmed and neatly packed in clean barrels. These roots sold easily. The brothers worked on, in the light of the grins of their neighbors. They took out more rocks and every year they had more good roots and cabbages to take to market "That dumb, poor land will all run, out in a year or two,'' said the farmers But it didn't. It got better and better and there were better and better crops until the brothers had got their yield