Norwich bulletin., 1919-08-15

flint corn hereabouts, which can be ciassed as good. Some few arc sfaia to middlin' and some. are poor. Fully half are below any possible classffica- I tion,-pittful and hopeless in their
 stunted, spindling, yeliowish failure A neishbor whose business takes him
 to ali parts of my township. and who knows the appearance and promise of
 the crops on more than hundred farms, told me, last week. that he hadn't yet seen a really good field of l potatoes. -The best one I've seen," ] he added, is that little piece of Jim 1 Straits at the Center. I myself, have passed that patch forty times. this summer, and shouldn't class it as l taking more than sixty points out of a possible hundred, Locally, at least. everything points to a tremendous shortage in potatoes and corn and l oats, with a less than average yield of l hay. good many of my neighbors who ordinarily raise all the potatoes 1 they need and have from one hundred l to three hundred bushels to sell will, 1 this year. have to buy for their own winter needs. | . But there is something more in the season than merely unusual weather jsconditions.-someth ething sinister and, | to me, inexplicable. There are forces working, this summer, which hitherto 1 have been absent or held in abeyance. | Take, for instance. garden peas. When l my crop failed I ascribed 1t at first | LO the drought or June ana a larger than usual infestation of the pea weevil. But wider. observation has l shown that these were not the causes. An acre patch sown by a big market 1 gardener nearer the city and son low ! land which not even the June drought could dry, failed even more m:serably 1 than mine. I have, heard of another farmer in the canning district and sewing forty acres, whose vines all l died without setting even a pod. Not single large. in icir1 ifx- l has had so much as half a crop. Yet l I have seen three small home garden ! rows which did finely even better than usual The curious thing about it is i that two of these were sown on ground drier than mine. with thinner soil, and 1 one on almost muddy land right be- side a sluggish brook. So 1t couldn't have been the drought And out of two
 dozen roots I pulled in my patch, only 1 two had been even touched by the weeyil. The other twenty-two, how
 ever. were just as dead as those. My asparagus bed produced but half normal crop, despite generous fer filtration and assiduous cultivation. Moreover. fully half the roots on one side of the bed have died. leaving wide open spaces for chickweed and wild I.ap'a 'aranth to come in.
 Lettuce, promising at first, failed to redeem theS promise by. refusing to l make heads and running up to seed before even a suggestion of head had formed. Spinach the same; no 1 leaves to speak of but seed stalk. starting before it was two inches out of the. ground. Tomatoes are r1aalx- ing but scanty growth with only scattered settings of fruit and un-
 precedented slowness Of rfpening Per contra, onions, beets,. carrots
 and pop-corn are about the best ever saw. And early ca abbage. which are usually a very chancery crop with nles are earlier, bigger and harder headed 1 than the average
 But eauliHowerl It. is a. croo with l cess especially with the earlier Va rieties. They are heading .wen enough this year. but we can't blanch the heads My usual rule has been to tie them when about two inches across and in from four to eight days. cut white curdy heads which would sell readily for frorn twenty to forty cents. This year not over one head out of ten will blanch. no matter how carefully
 tied. picked out an especially prom
 ising one week ago and tied it with pernickety. care. The leaves were
 tucked in and folded over each other
 could reach the head. Yesterday I cut it-about as big as a large saul cer, and as purple as q lilact I found one customer who thought she could
 use it in pickles and sold it to her for a nickel.
 Peppers. which have ordinarily raised with great ease and much pe-
 cuniary satisfaction haven't. thus far. produced one- tenth of q. crop. and show no promise of doing better while egg plant, which seldom does any thing here. is looking about the best ever. ly Melons. are sos backward thatsI see To Likelihood of any ripentng before killing frosts, while cucumbers and simmer squash are otltyielding my best previous records. sr
 "i've been working these same gar dens and these same crops for more knew something about their ,idiosyn- cracies. Now I find that I don't-that I don't know and can't find out the why's and wllerefores of their conduct. song their ways and their actions is werry mysterious
 My old neighbor. George Hull, used to say that farming was the biggest gamble on earth, and that any law would put every farmer of the land out of business. He's dead. now, and can't laugh at him. Instead I'm inclined to take off my hat to his headstone in the local cemetery.
 Anyway, I'm going to get some profit
 out of the muddle. It can be done
 We old codgers whose fingers are
 bent to the crook of the blow handle
 often get so durned ''sot'' in our ideas
 that we need little jolting. We're in-
 clined to become opinfopated We're
 apt to think tkat we know it ail-and then some. We don't want nobody to
 tell us how to farm. Gosh, what do
 folks think we've been doin' all these
 years? Don't they s'pose we know
 what we kin raise and how we kin
 raise it? What do we want of any
 county agent .or farm bureau man?
 We don't want no youngster from no
 college to tell us nothin'., We KNOW,
 we do.
 That's the way good many of u.
 think; at least, it's the way too anany
 of us talk.
 And then. right in the midst of our
 overweening self satisfaction, along comes Nature with. 1919 season and
 knocks the underpinning out from un
 der our conceit of ourselves.
 The wisest man in the world is the
 one who knows how little he knows.
 That's tise highest knowledge vet