Norwich bulletin., 1916-11-18

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 In fact, my neishbo- told me, that he hadn't heard of .a single cat crop in the town which turned out even tolerably. Some were not quite such compute failures as others, but not one was classifiable es a success. He added that this year was simply bit worse than others had been recently, and he, for one, had about made up his mind that there wasn't any use in his trying at the crop any more.
 All of which makes it look suspici- ously as if what I twenty years ago, regarded as q piece of sporadic and individual bad luck, was really just the symptom of an epidemic which has slowly spread over the entire neighbor1ood.
 And that has set me thinking about other changes in farm production which have occurred within my own memory or within the records of the three Jchn Farmer generations who have farmed and fizzled in this par ticular valley of inGecision.
 My grandfather and my father in his earlier farming years used to raise wheat here as commonly, IS easily, and as profitably as rye. Then that crop began to peter out on them, so that they, with all their neighbors, had to give it up as a bad job. For fifty years I don't suppose enough wheat has been grown in this whole town to make ten carrels of four And I grew two barrels of that, as an experiment. 'to see what I could do." One year my experiment paid me a fair businessg profit. Other years it failed to cover expenses At present prices of wheat, I tnirk even my worst showing would have returned d pro- fit. But wheat was cheaper, then. Ard now I have other interests which take up all my tine and demand all the fertilizer l gan m Ike, buy, beg borrow or steal! Others in the vicin- ity who ave tried raising i- for their dickens. but WiC idck my personal willingness to butter over small de tai-s, re,,ort t!Iat the.' cant co noth- actually raise it if the. would study soil conditions and fertilizer require ments and culjivation methods, 1 don't feel sure. I think they couid< on se- lected acres, with 7Gefuate manuring and prope, cultivation Eu:, even then, whether they could do it at a profit is an open aquesEon. They say they cant, and what they say has to go, at present.
 It certainly looks as if we of this particular neck-owocGs had passed pHt Ol Il-c tittsf eEtl now, as we paSS- ed out If the Whca! era fifty years syne. It may still De possible for us to raise both crops, in limited quan- titles. on selected fields at the cost of exceptional labor and skiIlful pre- paration But not as once, when they would both gro0 anywhere and as ra pidly as buckwheat.
 When my father took hold of this very farm, it, had like all the other farms of the vicinity. it's peach or chard, which produced crops as reg ularly and as abundantly as it's apple trees. Forty years ago that reach or chard had dTindled to two stubborn old trees. which just lived, from year to year, but refused to bear even one peach every other year. New ones had been set, only to die a-bornin' ," have tried alh that I know or can learn from others about peach -rais- ing: havA bought trees of many differ ent varieties and have tested all the schemes of fertiiizing and spra wing and the ike which q busy farmer can reasonably he asked to try. As a re- suit, I believe we have one smal II, scrubby shrub which regularly winter kills as to it's top and then, each spring, starts out a feeble growth of shoots, only to be killed the next win ter.
 One neighbor, professional fruit grower, who has probably hundred acres in orchards of various sorts some years ago made an attempt at peaches, remembering how, on q cer- tain hill slope of his place, they had used to bear profusc!y when he was