The Library of Work and Play: Outdoor Work
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Title: The Library of Work and Play: Outdoor Work
Author: Mary Rogers Miller
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIBRARY OF WORK AND PLAY: OUTDOOR WORK ***
THE CHILDREN'S LIBRARY
OF WORK AND PLAY
CARPENTRY AND WOODWORK
By Edwin W. Foster
ELECTRICITY AND ITS EVERYDAY USES
By John F. Woodhull, Ph.D.
GARDENING AND FARMING
By Ellen Eddy Shaw
HOME DECORATION
By Charles Franklin Warner, Sc.D.
HOUSEKEEPING
By Elizabeth Hale Gilman
MECHANICS, INDOORS AND OUT
By Fred T. Hodgson.
NEEDLECRAFT
By Effie Archer Archer
OUTDOOR SPORTS, AND GAMES
By Claude H. Miller, Ph.B.
OUTDOOR WORK
By Mary Rogers Miller
WORKING IN METALS
By Charles Conrad Sleffel.
[Illustration: Photograph by Helen W. Cooke. Harvesting Nature's Crops]
_The Library of Work and Play_
OUTDOOR WORK
BY
MARY ROGERS MILLER
[Illustration]
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1911
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO
EIGHT BROTHERS AND SISTERS WHO SENT
ONE ANOTHER TO COLLEGE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Acknowledgment is due to the expert writers of United States government
and state experiment station bulletins from which much practical
information has been gained by the author; to the boys and girls who
wrote for this book the stories of their success in several kinds of
outdoor industry; to Dr. Burton N. Gates, State Inspector of Apiaries
in Massachusetts, and Prof. James E. Rice of the Department of Poultry
Husbandry at Cornell University for reading the chapters on their
specialties and for numerous suggestions which make those chapters
valuable; and to many others from whom helpful ideas have come in
letters.
A WORD TO PARENTS
There are two sovereign cures for the ills of modern life: Work and
outdoors. It is the purpose of this book on "Outdoor Work for Young
People" to teach the gospel of these two remedies, not in lessons nor
sermons, but in the form of confidential talks, which are intended to
be both practical and inspiring.
The guiding principles in the preparation of this book are three: 1, to
help young people to earn money; 2, to help them build character; 3, to
help them make better citizens.
1. The most obvious reason why children wish to work is that they "want
to earn money," to spend as they like. Here is a great opportunity
and a considerable danger. The opportunities are to help support the
family, to learn self-reliance, to gain in efficiency, to appreciate
the sacrifices made by parents, to purchase innocent pleasures, and
to save toward a college education. The dangers are that children
may become too commercially minded, grasping, even dishonest, make
dull playmates, and become stunted in character for lack of play
and wholesome stimulus to the imagination. If you will analyze these
dangers you will find that they are all the results of overdoing good
things. The old rule of the Greeks, "Nothing too much" is the golden
rule to measure perfect commercial relations between parents and
children.
2. But far more important than money making is character making.
And therefore one of the principles of this book is to suggest in a
thousand ways that money making may go too far. For example, I would
encourage boys to gather and sell nuts, but not to take nuts from a
neighbour's trees without permission nor destroy young trees whose
future crops belong to a future generation of boys. I encourage
trapping but urge the use of humane traps to avoid cruelty. I encourage
the gathering and selling certain wild flowers, if abundant, but warn
against the danger of exterminating species, or of robbing the public
of pleasure. I have gone over all of the things that children do out of
doors and have tried to select the best occupations. I have studied the
worst things they do and have suggested their opposites--constructive
work that earns money, develops character, or preserves public
property. For example, instead of collecting birds' eggs I suggest
methods of attracting birds, building houses for them, and providing
food and protection from enemies.
3. The book is addressed to the citizens of nineteen hundred and
twenty. Will not busy boys and girls make better citizens than idle
ones? Practical patriotism becomes second nature to children who learn
early to regard the rights of others, to respect the laws, and to
protect public property. The boy who raises wild fowl and liberates
them or refrains from mutilating for purely selfish ends a fine tree is
doing his share in the great work of conservation.
But the young workers cannot do it all. You will be disappointed if
you give this book to a child for a birthday or Christmas present
and expect him to "do the rest," without further help. There is no
substitute for affectionate parental interest. This book will surely
fail you if you do not thoroughly believe in the dignity of manual
labour and experience the uplift that rewards work with your own hands.
Although in theory we may all believe in the dignity of labour (for
other people), many of us make mental reservations to suit our own
cases and persist in regarding certain forms of labour as distinctly
beneath our dignity. Children see through that attitude every time.
When I used to be acquainted with the citizens of the George Junior
Republic, they had a saying that even the President and the Judge could
not maintain standing with the others unless they took their turn now
and then working in the ditch. And so I say, work with your children,
with common tools, out in the dirt. The scratches will heal and the
dirt will wash off, but the sense of kinship with workers will stay.
Have a "You and I" club, with you and the children for members. Meet
once a week to discuss schemes for earning money to buy what the
children want. It is easier to go out and earn the money and give it to
them to spend, but where do they come in? Read parts of this book aloud
when outside information or suggestion is needed. Make a list of your
children's occupations; consider whether they are the best ones. If you
know any better ones than I have put into this book please tell me, for
I, too, have children and I wish them to have the very best works and
plays that children in this world can have.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Best Ways of Earning Money 3
II. Harvesting Nature's Crops 9
Wild berries--Wild fruits--Nuts--Tree seeds--Christmas
greens--Medicinal plants--Walking sticks--Wild
flowers for city children--Corn husks--Fragrant
herbs and grasses--Balsam leaves--Birch
bark--Porcupine quills--Maple sugar--Wild rice--Spruce
gum--Mushrooms.
III. Raising Domestic Animals 101
Colts--Sheep--Goats--Calves--Pigs--Chickens--Guinea
fowls--Turkeys--Peacocks--Ducks--Squabs
for market--Pheasants.
IV. Raising Animals for Pets 203
Shetland ponies--Rabbits, guinea pigs, and cavies--Fancy
pigeons--Bantams--Fancy fowls--Dogs--Goldfish.
V. Work and Play with Trained Animals 241
Dairy cows--Training pet animals--Training young
horses--Treadmills and cranks--Making animals
happy--Taming wild animals.
VI. Making Brooks and Springs Useful 271
Reclaiming a trout stream--Reclaiming a Spring--Making
a swimming pool.
VII. Keeping Bees 287
VIII. Raising Silkworms 338
IX. Making Collections 350
Plants--Shells--Insects.
X. Odd Jobs 405
Kindling-wood--Cleaning a carriage--Work in the
orchard--Making rustic furniture--Selecting seed corn--Making
cider vinegar--Making grape juice--Making
leaf mould--Making lavender sticks--Drying corn--Making
a tennis court--Shovelling snow--Mowing
lawns--Utilizing wood ashes--Planting crocuses in the
lawn--Making ice--Cutting seed potatoes--Pruning--Cleaning
rugs.
XI. Making the Country a Better Place to Live In 450
Improving home grounds--Outdoor clubs--Attracting
birds--Domesticating wild game--Protecting wild
flowers--Preventing forest fires--Killing weeds--Getting
rid of poison ivy--Lessening the plague of
mosquitoes--Fighting flies--Trapping--Curing and tanning
skins.
Appendix
Free Printed Matter: How to Get It 514
List of Books and Bulletins by Experts on Outdoor
Work 518
ILLUSTRATIONS
Harvesting Nature's Crops _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Gathering Wild Flowers for City Children 62
"Big Boy Blue" Looks After the Sheep 106
Feeding the Goats 114
The Shetland Pony is the Ideal Pet 204
Holding a Conversation 242
Gyp Has an Ax to Grind 250
A Group of Happy Farm Animals 256
The Skunk is an Amiable and Well-mannered Pet 266
The Crow May be Tamed when Young 266
A "Bottle Baby" 268
Plenty of Trout in This Stream When Grandfather
was a Boy 272
An Odd Job that is Never Out of Date 404
Is this Work or Play? 452
OUTDOOR WORK
I
THE BEST WAYS OF EARNING MONEY
Couldn't you use more money if you had it? There are several million
American boys and girls just like you. They want a lot of things, a
lot of good things. Wouldn't you like a half dollar once a year for
a circus ticket, a quarter now and then for a box of candy, or ten
dollars for a new dress or some music lessons? You'd be glad to buy
your own clothes, and select them too, if you had the cash. That would
be a big help in thousands of families. Parents sometimes wish that
their children could "leave out" in new clothes in spring, like the
trees.
If you could begin to earn money at twelve you could save toward a
college education, too. Lots of boys and girls are earning their way.
You can. You can earn money between twelve and twenty years of age
without interfering with your schooling.
What kind of stories do you like best? Isn't it inspiring to read
about the boyhood of our great men. Do you remember young Abe Lincoln
splitting rails? Garfield drove mules on a tow path. The men and women
who are doing great things now started as boys and girls with work to
do. They washed dishes and split kindlings and fed chickens and milked
cows and dug potatoes. Now they are tunnelling mountains, building
bridges, helping make the world better in all sorts of courageous ways.
Don't you like to hear engineers, miners, sailors, inventors, animal
trainers, cowboys, foresters, and other workers talk about their work?
The only really happy people are the ones who have found the work they
love best. I have put some stories in this book. These are told by real
boys and girls who were successful in earning money. Can you beat them
at their own game? Will you try?
There are thousands of ways for young people in their teens to earn
money. I believe the best are the outdoor ways. I have suggested a list
of occupations, the best I can think of. Of course, no one person could
try them all. Circumstances must decide. You will succeed best with the
work which you like best. You must not let outside work interfere with
your studies. You must not undertake work that is too hard for your
strength or unsuited to your disposition. Maybe this list will help
you choose.
OCCUPATIONS SUITED TO THE FOUR SEASONS AND SOME THAT GO THROUGH THE YEAR
_Summer._--Gathering berries, tree seeds, bulbs and roots, wild
flowers and ferns, balsam leaves, medicinal plants, pine cones, making
collections, mowing lawns, marking tennis courts, sawing wood, cleaning
rugs, drying herbs, corn and fruits, raising queen bees, collecting
bait, rearing butterflies for museum specimens, gathering clam shells
for button factories, shocking grain, "toting" water.
_Fall._--Gathering fruit, nuts, making corn husk mats and baskets,
shelling corn, making leaf mould, clearing a field of stones, making
stone fence, making grape juice and cider vinegar, collecting
bayberries, painting barns and outbuildings, packing fruit, cleaning
farm implements, gathering faggots, collecting cocoons, collecting
insect homes for nature study.
_Winter._--Gathering spruce gum, collecting Christmas greens,
shovelling snow, pruning shrubs, vines and trees, trapping, tanning
skins, making candles, selecting seed corn, pruning and tying
grapevines, transplanting trees and shrubs, feeding birds.
_Spring._--Cutting seed potatoes, budding, grafting, cutting dandelions
from lawns, killing weeds, oiling ponds and ditches to kill mosquitoes,
shelling corn, starting silkworms, trout, frog and toad culture,
attracting birds, fighting flies.
_Year-Round Occupations._--Keeping bees, raising goldfish, training
animals, raising colts, sheep, pigs, goats, dogs, chickens and other
poultry, rabbits and other pets, collecting wood for kindling, turning
grindstone, milking, taming wild creatures, raising prize corn,
potatoes, or cotton.
THINGS WORTH THINKING ABOUT
Don't think only of the money you can earn. There's no use talking,
the work you do and the way you do it is going to have an influence on
your character. Do a good job! If you slight your work you cheat your
employer. You know it, if he doesn't. You cheat yourself, too. And when
you are working for yourself, you are the one who is doubly cheated by
slack methods. That's plain.
Don't choose an occupation you are doubtful about. Most occupations
are perfectly honourable. Dishonesty comes in methods. The grown-up
grafters, ten to one, were cheaters at games, and sneaks about work.
When in doubt, ask advice. Don't you like to be asked for your opinion?
Everybody does. Ask your parents' advice about the work you think of
undertaking, and the methods of carrying on the business side. What
will please them more than to know that you have a keen sense of honour?
This is my word of encouragement and inspiration to the boys and girls
who read this book. There are a hundred perfectly good reasons why you
should have more money of your own. And there are a thousand ways to
earn it. Every one of you can earn a college education. Choose the best
work _for you_, and do it with enthusiasm. If you want my advice about
your work or any information I can get for you, nothing would please me
more than to hear from you.
II
HARVESTING NATURE'S CROPS
PICKING BERRIES
The berry picking season begins "'long about knee-deep in June" with
the first wild strawberries. It does not end till the last cranberry
is harvested on the eve of Thanksgiving Day at the end of the drowsy
Indian summer. There is money to be earned at this occupation wherever
there is ambition to overcome difficulties and force of character
enough to step aside from the beaten paths. Fortunately berries are
ripe in vacation time. For some people berry picking has almost if
not quite the fascination of fishing. It lacks the objectionable
features of hunting, fishing and trapping. Guns, tackle, and traps are
unnecessary in this gentler sport. No costly tools are required. A
light pail, flaring somewhat at the top, is a good receptacle. A wire
bent into an S-shaped hook is handy to swing the pail over the forearm
while the ambidextrous picker almost doubles the day's harvest if the
fruit is extra plentiful.
There is hardly a state in the Union which has not plenty of wild
fruits. The young citizens of each state should know these fruits and
make the most of them. Some states or regions have fruits peculiar to
themselves. Wouldn't it be worth while for the domestic science or
cookery teacher in a country school to show her pupils how to utilize
these home products? We hear talk about the cost of materials for use
in classes in cookery. To let our wild fruits go to waste is poor
economy whichever way we look at it. Wouldn't you, if you live in
northern Michigan, like to exchange a pot of thimbleberry jam for one
made in North Carolina from persimmons? Or if you live in Montana would
you exchange buffalo berry marmalade with a Florida friend for guava
jelly or preserved cumquats?
WILD RASPBERRIES
Just the other day a girl from the shore of Lake Superior told me of a
camping trip on a part of the lake shore inaccessible except by water.
A storm on the lake kept them from going home when they had expected so
they gathered raspberries and canned and jammed them till their sugar
gave out, then until every available cooking utensil, even the coffee
pot, was full and the supply of berries was as unlimited as ever.
These great, luscious fruits, she said, were as big as the end of her
thumb, and fairly falling off the bushes with the weight of juice.
Doesn't it make your mouth water? The pickers who live near the woods
up there bring berries to town in milk pails. The fruit box may be more
elegant, but there is a bountiful sound about the milk pail that takes
my fancy. Of course, one gets scratched while berry-picking; but in
what a good cause. Is there something wrong about boys and girls who
prefer boxed berries and smooth hands to wild fruits and scratches?
There are thousands of dollars wasted every year that might be working
on some boy's or girl's schooling, just because nature's crop of
raspberries isn't half harvested.
Wild raspberries should be canned, jellied, or jammed by the regulation
methods. With a good oil stove all the work can be done in the open air.
THIMBLEBERRY
Do you know the thimbleberry? Some call it the flowering raspberry.
You will know by its shape and general look that it is a cousin to the
black raspberry although it is flatter, seedier, and more sharply acid.
It grows on a bush or shrub somewhat like a raspberry, but its leaves
are broad, like grape leaves. Instead of thorns its twigs are clothed
with sticky hairs. The colour of the fruit is pinkish purple.
Thimbleberries grow often along woods margins, just back of the fringe
of wild red raspberries. You are lucky if you get two cupfuls of the
thimbleberries while your companion is picking two quarts of the
raspberries. Yours pack more closely and the fruit is not so abundant.
The number of people who have tasted thimbleberry jam is small. I am
told by one who has made it that you can get any price you ask for tiny
glasses of it, even a dollar a glass, from people who "must have it."
Made just as one does other jams, equal parts of fruit and sugar, there
is nothing tastes quite like it.
BLUEBERRIES
Blueberry pie was a staple and justly popular dessert in a certain
college dining-room, where I first made its acquaintance. It was, of
course, made of canned blueberries, and we used to wonder where they
all came from. We certainly never saw them growing in the Mississippi
Valley. The blueberry belt is a wide one and includes all the eastern
and central states. I first saw them growing on Cape Ann, and later on
the New Hampshire hills. The women and children used to bring them in
small pails to sell at the doors of their less enterprising neighbours.
But the price was always high and the berries not first class, unless
we gathered them ourselves. It takes a lot of picking to get two
quarts. One gets an entirely wrong impression of the blueberry business
from these experiences.
The great canning factories do not depend on a haphazard crop. In
New England and the eastern states there are thousands of acres of
waste land, shorn of its forest, where blueberries grow in greatest
abundance. It is not possible to estimate with any accuracy the value
of this wild crop. Pickers get from one and one-half to three cents a
quart, and the boxes sell in retail market at from twelve and one-half
cents to eighteen cents a box. Northern Michigan shipped five thousand
bushels one year. They ship better than softer fruits, but the price
is always high and the supply small because the canning factories are
near the fields, and shipping is expensive. One large factory uses
seven hundred bushels a day. The total product of the Maine canneries
ten years ago was worth over one hundred thousand dollars. That must be
where our college cook got her supply.
Huckleberry and blueberry are the names used most commonly and you will
meet people who know one from the other. But as both are blue and there
are high bush and low bush huckleberries, as well as high and low bush
blueberries, it is useless to discuss the names. Both are right and a
huckleberry in Ohio may be a blueberry in Maine.
A sort of rake to gather blueberries is used for the low bushes. But
hand picking is best. The rake tears the bushes so, and the berries
have to be put through a fanning mill twice to free them from leaves
and rubbish. This process fits them for the canners who are not as
particular as we wish they were.
The blueberry bush is a kind of Indian. It does not take kindly to
gardens and other civilized places. It thrives and yields abundantly
if given a chance on its native hillsides, and comes up by the million
wherever the cutting of the timber lets in the light. By burning over
the blueberry land in very early spring while the ground is wet,
those in charge can keep down the alder, poplars, birches, and other
non-money-making growths, and this is taken by the blueberries as their
chance. They come right up, and deliver a tremendous crop the first
year after the burning.
WILD GRAPES
We used to gather wild grapes along the river bottoms in the middle
West when we went nutting. Sometimes our nutting excursion turned out
to be a grape harvest. These grapes were small, almost black under
their thin coat of bloom, in clusters like miniature garden grapes. Oh,
but they were puckery when green, but the frost sweetened them. The
vines grew tremendously, way to the tops of the trees, their stems like
great ropes, which we used for swings. The grapes were really mostly
seed and skin, but there was juice enough to stain our aprons, and give
the teeth and tongue an unmistakable telltale hue. There was juice
enough for a kind of jelly which I believe had the peculiarity of never
"jelling" properly. It is good, though, and they were well worth the
sugar to make them edible.
I was surprised at their size when I first saw the big summer grapes
of the eastern hedge-rows and banks. But their flavour is no great
improvement over that of the frost grape. There is more pulp, though.
My barberry gathering friend, who admits that she is "fond of all sorts
of woodland flavours," gathers these grapes in August before they
begin to change colour. She makes the only really green grape jelly I
have seen. This is her receipt:
Wash the stemmed grapes very carefully to rid them of dust and possible
taint from poison ivy, with which they often associate. Put them into a
preserving kettle with a very little boiling water, cover and let them
steam till tender. (No boiling here.) Strain to get rid of seeds and
skins. (Work fast at this point, because delay may cause the change of
colour we wish to avoid.) Weigh the juice and an equal amount of white
sugar. Heat sugar and juice separately, without scorching. Stir the hot
sugar into the boiling juice, let boil up, skim, and put into dry, hot
glasses. If it boils a long time it loses the green colour, and its
flavour of the wild out-of-doors.
Green grape jelly that is really green is a triumph. It would bring a
price.
ELDERBERRIES
Elderberries have almost gone out of fashion in these days of
refrigerator cars and cold storage, when fruits from all parts of the
world are brought to our doors. But I am antiquated enough to like the
rather flat, seedy things, and the "runny" jelly is of a wonderful
colour and flavour. Best of all is the fun of gathering the broad,
flat clusters, always seeing a finer one just a few steps farther on
or just over the fence. The golden-rod is brilliant in the September
sunshine, the asters like star stuff sifted in every fence corner,
while the fox grapes clambering over stray trees along the line fence
fill the air with fragrance. Perhaps I could get on without the
elderberries, but the New England conscience requires some practical
excuse for traipsing off over the fields when there is useful work to
be done indoors. Elderberries canned in a thin syrup, one cup of water,
two of sugar, and all the berries the jar will hold, are excellent for
steamed pudding. Drain off the juice, and stir the berries into the
batter just as you would blueberries, mulberries, or any other fruit.
The colour of the pudding will be awe-inspiring but with the juice for
sauce it is good, really.
BARBERRIES
Our Westchester County hostess always took a basket on her arm when
she went for a walk. She had an unusual taste for wild flavours of all
sorts and her guests were always sure of some delightful surprise at
her table. In September there is a choice of wild fruits, and everybody
recognized the necessity for a basket. I wondered, though, when we
passed, unnoticed, bushels of elderberries, and rods of browning
grapes, and headed for a group of dogwood trees. But although the
berries were thicker than I ever saw on the dogwood, they were only
admired and left for the sun to burnish. High on a bare hilltop we sat
where the view was panoramic. The lady with the basket betook herself
to a fringe of tall, ruddy bushes on the brow of the hill, and I found
her busily filling her basket with barberries. She did not wait to pick
them singly but snipped off the laden twigs with scissors, avoiding
thus the angry thorns.
"What are they good for?" I asked, as I tasted again the sharp,
astringent flavour and felt that indescribable pucker on tongue and
lips that goes with it. The barberry had long been a favourite with me;
the bush for its wayward grace and its cunning flowers, the berries for
their exquisite bloom and for tasting so unlike any cultivated thing.
But I had never dreamed of making jelly of them.
"Jelly," said our hostess. "It's particularly good with game."
Of course it would be good with game, but can you imagine eating
barberry jelly with corn-fed pork or with fat mutton?
The berries should be gathered before they are fully ripe and treated
like currants, although the yield of juice is meagre. Add a little
water and heat slowly. Strain and add "pound for pound" of sugar. Put
in tiny glasses. Any one in search for a unique Christmas gift for an
epicurean uncle would find barberry jelly fills the bill.
In Salem, Mass., I saw barberries for sale in the market. They looked
mightily out of place along with pineapples, watermelons, grapes,
peaches, Japanese plums, and other conventional market fruits.
BAYBERRIES
Two friends of mine, summering on Cape Ann, discovered there to their
delight, a low shrub, growing in great profusion on the rocky hills.
The foliage was of a rich green colour, of a leathery texture, and was
possessed of an aromatic odour at once delightful and wholesome to
their senses. They were seized with a great desire to take home with
them a quantity of this plentiful foliage to make into pillows or to
feed the fire on the hearth that they might inhale its fragrance, and
be reminded of Cape Ann and the summer sea.
So they procured huge gunny sacks which they were at some pains to
stuff to their utmost capacity. They have a snapshot of themselves,
bent double under the weight of the great sacks. With the help of
a friendly native they succeeded in transporting the burdens to the
express office, and addressed them home. We cheerfully paid the
expressman's charges at the home end, having been advised that the bags
were coming, and carried them to the attic floor where they were to be
spread to cure. But when the contents came tumbling out, its pent-up
fragrance was familiar. Then was it possible those blessed geese had
been spending their precious vacation days gathering bay berry leaves?
It was even so, and we had paid nearly two dollars express on the
bags--and our woods were full of it! What a laugh we had at their
expense when they came to reimburse us.
The bayberry shrub is also called wax myrtle and it is easy to see why,
when you find the berries in October. They are gray, almost white, and
you see that each one is covered with tiny drops of wax that has oozed
out of the berry and dried on its surface.
Bayberry is called candleberry, too, because of the use our
great-grandmothers made of the wax. Bayberry dips have come into
fashion again and people who make them skilfully find a ready sale for
their product.
MAKING BAYBERRY DIPS
To make bayberry candles you must first gather the wax-covered berries.
Get them early, for, as cold weather comes on, the pellets of wax drop
off. Two quarts make only a little ball of wax, so you must gather an
enormous quantity of the berries. Put them into water and bring it to
a boil, stirring well to be sure that all the wax is melting. Being
lighter than water the wax will rise to the surface. When you think
all the berries are bare, take them from the fire. As the water cools,
the wax hardens on top. If the berries do not all go to the bottom you
will have to melt the wax again over a slow fire or in a double boiler
until the wax rises clean at the top; all dirt and refuse on its lower
surface can be scraped off. Do not let the wax burn. Smoke is a sure
sign that it is too hot. In a double boiler there is no danger.
To make the dips, take regular candle wicking, a soft, white, loosely
twisted cord, cut it twice the desired length for the candle. Double it
and twist enough to hold it together. The loop at one end is convenient
to hold it by. Dip into the hot wax and then as it cools draw the wick
down with finger and thumb so that it hangs straight and kinkless.
A second dip adds a little to the diameter of the candle, the third
another layer and so on till your first bayberry dip is finished. If
the first effort is not a good shape and has to go back into the pot
you needn't be discouraged. Didn't the first chocolate cream you ever
made look like a chestnut gone wrong? But with patience it is possible
for even a beginner to produce very shapely candles. They do not need
to be absolutely regular. Paraffin or tallow candles, moulded just
alike by the hundred thousand dozen, may be as round and perfect as
machinery can make them. Part of the charm of the bayberry dips is in
these slight irregularities of shape and size.
WILD CRAB APPLES
Thickets of small trees, bearing little solid green apples are a
feature of almost every farm in the prairie states. They are common
also on the hilly pastures of Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and New
York. The South, too, has its native crab apple. School children the
country over loved in my day to fill their pockets with the hard, sour,
little fruits and nibble at them surreptitiously under cover of a broad
geography. But perhaps children's tastes have changed since that far
time.
Modern geography must be different, anyhow. I saw one the other day
shaped just like a fifth reader or history or any other. It just looked
like any book, not one bit like a g'ography.
The little crabs were made into sauce or "butter," by pioneers of the
prairie states. We washed, quartered, and cut out the wormy places,
stewed them till soft with a little water, then put them through a
coarse sieve to take out seeds, cores, and skin. The pulp was then
sweetened with sorghum molasses and boiled; stirring is necessary to
prevent burning. The appetites of those days did not demand dainty
fare. Well do I remember a small visitor to whom our cookery was new
whose demand for crab-apple-sauce-if-you-please was hard to satisfy. I
believe crab apple jelly would be regarded a great delicacy by people
of good taste, if once they had a try at it.
PERSIMMONS
The children of the persimmon belt, which includes a much larger part
of the eastern half of the United States than many suppose, all know
that the fruit of some trees is better than that of others. The 'possum
knows, too, and lucky is he who finds both "fruits" on the same tree.
There is a market for persimmons if they are gathered after frost,
and a greater demand may be created. Seeing an unfamiliar fruit in
the market is very likely to awaken the interest. Whether the buyer
will want a second basket or not depends entirely upon the cleverness
of the person that supplies the demand. The thoroughly ripe fruit is,
according to an experienced traveller, "entirely without bitterness
or astringency, sweet, rich, and juicy." What more can you say about
watermelon or strawberries? But if you who gather the fruits persist
in hurrying them green into market you may expect that the prejudice
against persimmons will grow stronger.
HAWS
Is there any good reason why some of the people who used to be boys
should never have a chance to taste any thorn apples now that they are
older? Perhaps these grown-up boys deserve to be punished for deserting
the old haunts, but give them a taste of what the open road has to
offer and maybe they will be tempted back to a simpler life.
The fruit of the May haw or apple haw of the far South is sold in
the markets of some cities and is made into preserves and jelly. The
Washington thorn which grows wild in Virginia and the other states not
far from the capital city is also cultivated in many gardens farther
north. It has run wild from these gardens and ranges over New York,
Pennsylvania and neighbouring states. Though usually small, its berries
are a beautifully shining scarlet and very numerous. It is worth
risking a pound or so of sugar just to see what jelly they would make.
The pear haw has a thick, juicy flesh, and some of the yellow ones are
equally good.
WILD PLUMS
The wild plums of the East did not strike the early settlers as very
much worth while. They were almost all seed and skin and the rest
was "pucker." Quite naturally the plums of the mother country were
preferred and sprouts were brought over and set in the gardens of our
forefathers. These plum emigrants did so well in the new country that
they escaped from the gardens into the pastures and roadsides, coming
up wherever seeds were dropped. In such places they still flourish
and are thought of as wild plums. They are gathered for market, but
compare unfavourably, except with very old-fashioned people, with the
garden-grown fruits of the same or similar varieties.
The pioneers of the middle West, however, found very fine plums
growing wild in plentiful thickets. We used to gather these native
plums in the Mississippi Valley, in great tubfuls. We not only
appreciated the crop nature provided for us every year, but were
far-sighted enough to realize that the time would come when the march
of civilization would tramp out the plum thickets. So we planted them
in orchards and gardens, taking those trees that had given us the best
crops of the biggest, finest fruit. In fact, the pioneers did just what
we ought to be doing all over our country with other wild fruits and
with nuts. The wild goose plum is a native which has founded a race of
which there are many named varieties, much bigger and finer than the
little, old, wild grandmother of the plum thicket, but they all have
still that same tart tang, just under the skin, that gave to our wild
plum "jell" its incomparable flavour.
Are the wild plums all forgotten? Must all fruit come out of boxes and
have that stale taste of the town? Must it lose its characteristic
aroma and give off only that general "markety" smell? Is "goin'
plummin'" entirely out of fashion, even in the prairie states? I don't
believe it is as bad as that. Do you believe that moving pictures or
shoot the shoots or merry-go-rounds can begin to compare with such
simple pleasures as plumming, graping, berrying, and nutting? I have
tried both, and give me the old, homely pleasures every time.
The following extract from "The Tree Book" so well describes an annual
outing of pioneer children that it is quoted in full:
"'Do you calculate to go a-plummin' this fall?' The question was
quietly put in father's judicial tones, but it sent an electric thrill
from head to toes of every youngster. Mother's reply sent an answering
current, and the enthusiasm of the moment burst all bounds. 'Well, you
better go this afternoon. I can spare the team and wagon, and I guess
John is big enough to drive. There's no use goin' at all if you don't
go right off.'
"So mother and the children rode out of the yard, she sitting with her
young driver on the spring seat, the rest on boards laid across the
wagon box behind. What a jouncing they got when the wheels struck a
stone in a rut! But who cared for a trifle like that? John's reckless
driving but brought nearer the goal of their heart's desire.
"A lurid colour lightened the plum thicket as it came in sight. The
yellow leaves were falling and the fruit glowed on the bending twigs.
Close up the wagon is drawn; then all hands pile out, and the fun
really begins. How large and sweet they are this year! Mother knows how
to avoid the puckery, thick skin in eating plums. The youngsters try
to chew two or three at once and their faces are drawn into knots. But
they soon get used to that.
"Now the small folks with pails are sent to pick up ripe plums under
the trees, and warned against eating too many. 'Remember last year,'
says mother, and they do remember. The larger boys spread strips of
burlap and rag carpet under the fullest trees, in turn, and give their
branches a good beating that showers the plums down. With difficulty
the boys and girls make their way into the thicket; but torn jackets
and aprons and scratched hands can be mended--such accidents are
overlooked in the excitement of filling the grain sacks with ripe
fruit. How fine 'plum butter' will taste on the bread and butter of the
noon lunch when winter comes and school begins. (The Pennsylvanian's
love for 'spreads' on his bread leavened the West completely.)
"Other neighbours have come, and started in with a vim. It seems
unreasonable to take any more. The bags are full, and there are some
poured loose into the wagon box. Besides, everybody is tired, and John
shouts that the hazel-nuts are ripe on the other side of the log road.
"A great grape vine, loaded with purple clusters, claims mother's
attention. There will probably be no better chance for grapes this
fall, and the sun is still an hour high. John chops down the little
tree that supports it and the girls eagerly help to fill the pails with
the fruit of the prostrate vine, while John goes back to command the
hazel-nut brigade and sees that no eager youngster strays too far.
"Mother's voice gives the final summons, and the children gather at the
wagon, tired but regretful for the filled husks that they must leave
behind on the hazel bushes. A loaded branch of the grape vine is cut
off bodily, and lifted into the wagon. The team is hitched on, and the
happy passengers in the wagon turn their faces homeward."
Such was the poetry of pioneer life. Pleasures were simple, primitive,
hearty--like the work--closely interlinked with the fight against
starvation. There was nothing dull or uninteresting about either. The
plums and grapes were sweetened with molasses made from sorghum cane.
Each farmer grew a little strip, and one of them had a mill to which
every one hauled his cane to be ground "on the shares."
Who will say that this "long sweetenin'" was poor stuff, that the
quality of the spiced grapes suffered for lack of sugar, or that any
modern preserves have a more excellent flavour than those of the old
days made out of the wild plums gathered in the woods? And this is also
true: There is no more exhilarating holiday conceivable than those half
days when mother took the children and "went a-plummin'."
NUTS
The wild nuts gathered in this country for sale or home use in the
North are chestnuts, hickory nuts, black walnuts, butternut, hazel-nut,
beechnut; in the South, the pecan and the chinquapin; in the far West,
the pine nut. The least known of these in eastern markets are the
pine nuts, which form a very staple article of food for many tribes
of Indians in the Great Basin. John Muir says that there are tens of
thousands of acres covered with nut pines. An industrious Indian family
can gather fifty or sixty bushels in a month if the snow does not catch
them. The little cones are beaten off with poles as the trees are not
high, and are heated till they open and the nuts fall out from under
the scales. I have eaten pine nuts in Turkish restaurants. They came
as a surprise in a dish of eggplant stuffed with chopped meat, raisins,
nuts, bread crumbs, and I know not what all else.
The native chestnut, though smaller, is far sweeter than the popular
Spanish one. But it looks as if some foreigner must take the place
of our native chestnuts in the woods as well as in the market. The
chestnut disease which has driven the trees out of the parks and wood
lots near New York City is baffling the scientists. Every year the
deadline moves westward and southward and northward from its center.
Perhaps a cure will be found before all the chestnuts are gone. If any
region has a few trees which seem to withstand the disease while all
the rest die, those trees should be preserved and used to propagate a
race of chestnuts which would be immune. It may be that the Spanish
and Japanese chestnuts will prove hardier than our own. These are
being grown quite extensively in some Eastern states. They bear when
remarkably young. Japanese chestnuts begin to bear, according to the
nurserymen, "at three years of age, bear from three to seven nuts in
a bur, each nut measuring from four to five inches in circumference."
Trees five years old bear two or three quarts each and the yield
increases rapidly from year to year. These bring fancy prices in city
markets and are eaten either raw or cooked.
In growing chestnuts it is the practice first to cut down the old
native trees. As in all likelihood these would be dead in a few years
anyhow, this is economical. Dead lumber is not as valuable as live
lumber. The first year after a chestnut is cut, a crop of young suckers
come up around the stump. These shoots are grafted with scions of a
desired variety. There is a good story of a lad of twelve years of
age who asked his father to graft a chestnut tree. Although the man
was grafting apple trees at the time he laughed at the boy's idea.
The lad did not forget and years after he put his idea into practice
and now owns a chestnut grove which brings him an income of thousands
of dollars. His chestnut groves are on waste land unfit for ordinary
farm purposes. If one farm boy in every county would take an interest
in growing the nuts that belong to his region, think how the value of
the nut crop would increase. Every boy knows that the hickory nuts on
one particular shell-bark are bigger and sweeter than on every other
one he knows of. He and his friends try to get there first, before the
"other gang" do, and make sure of their share. But does he ever plant
any big sweet nuts along a fence row and take care of the young trees
till they are big enough to take care of themselves? In the seventeenth
century there was a law in certain European countries that every young
man should plant a certain number of walnut trees. Unless he could
prove that he had complied with the law, he couldn't marry. What a good
idea! With such a law we might have more fine trees and fewer hasty
marriages.
CHINQUAPINS
A coloured girl brought me a pint of chinquapins from her home in
Ca'line County, Virginia; I sampled them eagerly, taking great pleasure
in their diminutive prettiness, tidy shape, and rich, dark colouring.
I kept a handful securely tied in the little salt bag in which they
had made the journey and took them to my native state to show to the
children, who had never seen a chestnut tree of any kind.
When I took the bag from the trunk, there was a dustiness about the
feel of it that aroused my suspicions. I emptied the contents into a
flat dish. There were my nuts, their glossy brown shells as smooth as
ever, but empty. Rolling about amongst them were a lot of the plumpest
little white grubs, fairly bent double with corpulency. There must have
been one for each nut, for not a sound kernel was left.
I learn from chestnut-wise people that these weevils are another great
enemy of chestnut culture, no remedy having been found.
The chinquapin is the Southern child's chestnut. It is sometimes a
tree, but more often a low shrub. The bur is round and has only one nut
in it. A good many are marketed, especially in Southern cities, and
bring a good price when fresh. The weevils enter the nuts before they
are mature and it is difficult to find the bad nuts till too late to
prevent a disagreeable impression. This interferes with the popularity
of the chinquapin as a dessert nut.
HAZEL-NUTS
The American hazel-nut flourishes over the eastern half of the United
States. It is a sweet little nut, much more to my taste than the
bigger filbert, which is so popular in our markets. We used to gather
hazel-nuts in the edge of woods which fringe the little rivers of
the Mississippi Valley. The bushes grew in thickets and while the
big brothers and sisters gathered the nuts from among the closely
interlaced branches that grew scarcely higher than their heads, the
smaller fry crept in underneath and getting about on the floor of the
woods searched for nuts that had ripened early and dropped from the
browning husk.
There is no progress in simply going out in the fall and taking what
nature furnishes. Unaided, the good mother goes on producing the same
small nuts, caring just as patiently for the inferior ones and even
encouraging the nut weevils to prey upon them. But I wonder if some boy
or girl who thinks there isn't any interesting work to be done on the
farm, could not make some experiments in hazel-nut culture.
The bushes grow readily from seed, but seedlings do not always produce
as fine nuts as those that were planted. For this reason one can
save time by selecting the bushes that bear the largest crop of fine
nuts and propagating those. They grow in any well drained, fairly
rich soil and I know of hundreds of miles of fence rows answering
these requirements, which now produce poison ivy, cat brier and other
harmful crops. Hazel bushes make a beautiful fence row, and yield a
salable crop. Hazel bushes propagate naturally by suckers and layers.
By manuring well in summer long shoots for layering will be forced.
"These should be staked down in winter or spring and covered with
earth. They may be removed to nursery rows or orchard at the end of
the first season." So says W. A. Taylor in the "Cyclopædia of American
Horticulture." The same writer gives directions for pruning as follows:
Strong shoots should be headed back to promote spur formation (the
nuts are borne on short side shoots) and old wood that has borne fruit
should be removed annually. Suckers should be kept down unless wanted
for propagation. March or April is the best time to prune as they
blossom very early and one must avoid cutting off either the young nuts
or the pollen-bearing flowers. The nuts should be gathered when the
husk begins to brown at the edges. If left longer, as is most often
done, in the case of wild nuts, a large proportion of the crop falls
to the ground and is lost. Beside, the dried hulled nuts do not bring
as high a price as the fresh unhusked ones. If kept long in the husk
they will mould, unless dried thoroughly. The nuts, however, will keep
through the season in a cool place.
WALNUTS
The fruit of the black walnut is enclosed in a globe-shaped husk. All
country boys and girls know how that husk smells and how it stains the
fingers. The nuts are very oily and must be treated carefully. They
should be dried, preferably on the garret floor, hulled and stored in a
cool, dry place. If for market, they should be sold immediately. They
are very likely to grow rancid if kept. Billy, in the "Limberlost"
story, had a piece of heavy plank with a hole in it, just big enough to
let the husked nut through. He put an unhulled nut over the hole, then
with a wooden mallet, he drove it through the hole. It came through
clean.
The butternut or oilnut is from a tree closely related to the black
walnut. It is called also white walnut. The husk is not so thick as
that of the black walnut and adheres stubbornly to the nut if left to
dry. The nuts get rancid if kept warm and should be marketed as soon as
dry or kept stored in the cold and eaten before spring.
Pickled walnuts are a highly prized delicacy in households where
"culturine" has not taken the place of old-fashioned household arts.
The nuts are gathered when green, before the shell has hardened. If a
knitting needle can be pushed clear through the nut, it is not too old
for pickling. You will be fortunate if you can get a receipt from some
housewife who has time for real culture as well as for making pickles.
_Receipt for Pickled Walnuts._--(From my great aunt's cook-book.)
Ingredients: One hundred walnuts, salt and water, one gallon of
vinegar, two ounces of whole black pepper, half an ounce of cloves, one
ounce of allspice, one ounce of root ginger sliced, one ounce of mace.
Gather the nuts in July when they are full grown. They should be soft
enough to be pierced all through with a needle. Prick them all well
through. Let them remain nine days in brine (four pounds of salt to
each gallon of water), changing the brine every third day. Drain them,
and let them remain in the sun two or three days until they become
black. Put them into jars, not quite filling them. Boil the vinegar and
spices together ten minutes, and pour the liquid over the walnuts. They
will be fit for use in a month, and will keep for years.
BEECHNUTS
The boys of your neighbourhood may not know that the smooth,
gray-barked trees with very long, slender, pointed buds are beeches.
They may never have noticed the wonderful gray-green colour nor
delicate texture of the newly opened leaves, nor the soft, silky
flower head that bears the pollen. Too many boys think these
preliminaries are of no importance. The chances are strong that when
October ripens the nuts, nobody has any difficulty in locating beech
trees, if there are any in the vicinity. Usually, in the wild woods,
they grow in large groups of various sizes; the big trees sheltering
the little ones until they are strong enough to live in the full
sunlight. Do boys and girls find the beeches by instinct just as the
mice, the blue jays, the squirrels, and the foraging hogs do?
Do you know why it takes so much longer to gather a pint of beechnuts
than the same amount of hazel-nuts? They are pretty small; yes, but
there's another reason. If you were to count your beechnuts, you would
find it takes many more of them by count to make a pint than of the
round nuts, because of their triangular shape. They fit so snugly that
your pint measure of beechnuts is almost solid nuts. They are about the
sweetest of the wild nuts. They are very rich in fat too, and in olden
times an oil for table use was made from beechnuts. Olive oil takes
its place now and costs less. There is a market for all the beechnuts
you can gather. Dealers in tree seeds often have difficulty in filling
orders. As the nuts do not germinate till April they may be gathered
at any time during the winter, unless the wild folks have gathered them
all. The chances are that to get any you would have to go early and
search sharply. Once or so in a lifetime the burrow of a white-footed
mouse is discovered near beech woods. Are you hard hearted enough not
only to break and enter, but also to burgle his hoard? Rather admire
the little creature's industry and resolve to go and do likewise.
HICKORY NUTS
America is the only country that has native hickory nuts. Of these the
best nut producers are the shagbarks and the pecans. These two nuts are
increasingly popular. People are planting these nuts and experimenting
with new varieties, with grafting and cultivation, as never before.
Pecan orchards are being planted in many regions and hickory nuts are
being studied with a view to improving the kernel and reducing the
hardness of the shell. The value of hickory wood in the making of tools
and for fuel has made the lumber more profitable than the nuts. But
with improved varieties this may not be true. The poor quality of the
wood of the pecan has saved these native trees from destruction.
Hickory nuts have a husk as every country child knows; but the husk has
a good-natured habit of splitting neatly into four equal parts which
fall away from the nut when dry. There are several kinds of hickory
which produce sweet, edible nuts, but the nuts of the true shagbark are
the best. They grow on low hills near streams or swamps in good soil
in the Eastern and Middle states as far south as Florida, and as far
west as Kansas. The king nuts of the Mississippi are bigger, but not so
good, although the price you get for them is good and the baskets fill
faster than with the little shagbarks.
PECANS
This nut tree grows in the South, and as the wood is too brittle to be
very valuable nobody has cut it for lumber. Tremendous interest has
been aroused during the past ten years in pecan growing. Pecan orchards
are being planted in all sorts of soil, good, bad, and indifferent. The
wisest planters have gone to nature to learn what kind of conditions
the pecan requires. By cultivation and fertilizing and otherwise
improving good natural conditions, many growers are succeeding. By
planting nuts from trees that produce fine ones abundantly every year,
and by budding these trees with scions from still finer specimen trees
great improvement has been made. I have a picture of a pecan tree in
Georgia, sixteen years old, which is nearly fifty feet high. It has
borne already three hundred and fifty pounds of nuts and this year's
crop will be over a hundred pounds. This tree has never had to fight
weeds, has always had plenty to eat and drink, was protected in winter
while young, and now it is ready to foot all its own bills and give a
fine profit. How many of us are ready to do that at sixteen years? The
cultivation of pecans is only just begun. Very little of the annual
crop of these nuts is harvested in orchards. In "The Tree Book" the
author says that ninety-five per cent. of the crop is still gathered
in the woods. The annual crop is tremendous, and the pickers get only
three to ten cents a pound for the ungraded nuts. For the very best
nuts, mainly sold for seed, the retail price is from fifty cents to a
dollar a pound, which is from one to two cents per nut.
Who picks all these nuts in the woods? Surely, the boys and girls of
the pecan belt do their share. Do they do it in a primitive way or are
their methods worthy of the up-to-date American youngster? Professor
Hume of the Florida Agriculture Experiment Station (Bulletin No. 85,
1906) gives suggestions for gathering the pecan crop in the orchard
which ought to be useful to the "wild picker." The nuts ought to be
gathered as soon as the most of the burs have opened. In orchards, the
pickers use ladders for young trees and climb the big ones and gather
the nuts by hand into sacks. Beating and shaking the trees is only
resorted to for the nuts that are entirely out of reach. If allowed
to fall on the ground so many of the nuts are lost that the profits
are materially lessened. If practicable a large sheet should be placed
under the tree to save this loss.
The nuts should be spread under some sort of roof to cure, which
requires ten days or two weeks.
Have you ever tried the experiment of sorting and grading the nuts you
gather? The fruits of wild trees vary greatly in their size and general
appearance. The wholesale dealer who buys nuts undoubtedly grades them
and gets a fancy price for the big ones. Why should you not benefit by
this?
Pecans are graded by sifting them through screens, the mesh of which
lets only those of small size through. You might build up a private
trade in wild nuts by packing your best nuts in attractive pasteboard
boxes and charging a good retail rate for them. The inferior nuts you
could well afford to sell at the lowest wholesale price as your average
would be higher than the wholesaler would pay for unsorted nuts.
Your fancy nuts would have to be polished in order to compete with the
nuts sold in city markets. The polishing does not make the meat any
sweeter, but it does make a more attractive dessert nut, especially now
that folks are used to seeing them polished. This is done by putting
some dry sand into a barrel with the nuts and rolling the barrel about
till the nuts are polished. If you have a worn out barrel or box churn,
as we once had, that would be just the thing. Fancy packages of five to
ten pounds would be very much in demand at Christmas. The big cities
are well supplied with this sort of thing, but in the smaller cities
and larger towns there are always some people who know a good thing
when they see it and to whom the local markets often fail to supply
these little luxuries.
NUT GROWING
In Bulletin No. 125 of the Maryland Agricultural Experiment Station
published in 1908 you may read: "The young and middle-aged should not
only plant nut trees themselves, but should encourage the children to
do likewise. Every farm boy ought to have a small nut nursery and be
taught to plant and care for nut trees. Nothing more creditable could
be done in the schools than to interest the boys and girls in the
possibilities of nut production and to celebrate Arbor Day with the
planting of nut trees."
Doesn't that read like sound advice? Think of the land on your father's
farm to-day that is not working. Or if there isn't any idle land
can you not persuade him to lend you an acre or so for experimental
purposes? The chances are that he will encourage and help you because
he wants you to be interested in the farm. But you may say to yourself:
"Not much! I don't mean to stay on the farm. I'm going to work hard and
get an education. I want to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a banker."
Nevertheless, you take the Maryland man's advice and set out some nut
trees. Let us say you start your nut orchard at age fourteen when you
have three years yet in the high school. Your trees will be set so far
apart that some other crops will be grown between them; corn, potatoes,
melons, or anything that requires good cultivation and fertilization.
When you finish the high school your nut trees will not look very big,
but promising. You go on to college and in four years you will see a
big change. No crop is in sight yet but you are only twenty-one and
ready to go to work. You may forget all about those nut trees for a few
years but they are not forgetting their business. They will bear a few
nuts some year, as if to try their hand at a new enterprise. Some day
when you are needing a sum of money to start in business for yourself,
and you are wondering who will lend you that much, you will get word
from the folks at home that they have harvested your first crop of
pecans or English walnuts or Spanish chestnuts and have deposited a
thousand dollars in the bank in your name as the net profits. Will you
try it?
Before planting nut trees it is important to learn all you can by
reading and by correspondence with your Experiment Station experts
about the kinds that will do best in your region and on your soil. If
more boys used a little forethought we should have fewer young college
men struggling along on small salaries in work they dislike, just for
lack of a tidy sum of ready money to set them on their feet at the
critical time.
There are good reasons for this greater interest in nut growing in the
United States. The use of nuts is more common than formerly but they
are still a luxury. Wild nuts are scarcer, owing to the destruction
of the trees for lumber. The food value of nuts is better understood
than formerly, and many articles of food are manufactured now from
nuts. Nuts as meat substitutes have come into prominence within a few
years. This creates a demand which will increase. There is no danger of
over-production. Now is the time to get into the nut business.
TREE SEEDS
In his book on "Forestry" Professor Gifford says: "Collection of tree
seeds should yield good returns if properly conducted." That is good
news, for if ever a crop was allowed to go to waste it is this crop of
tree seeds. Any one who has seen a forest of young maples cut down by
lawn mowers in the helplessness of their seed-leaf stage realizes that
with any sort of forethought those seeds might have been made a source
of income.
Professor Gifford says a little farther on that many of the seeds of
our native trees can be more easily obtained in Europe than in America.
We may learn many lessons in economy from our neighbours over there.
But who is going to harvest the tree seeds? A mechanic who earns a
good wage cannot afford to gather tree seeds; neither can a bank clerk
unless he does the work in his vacation. But our boys and girls are
often at a loss to find ways of earning money. Here is a crop they
can gather without danger of trespassing. There is a market for this
harvest. Some tree seeds are difficult to get and expensive; red pine
for instance. Spruce trees produce seed only once in seven years. This
keeps the supply short. In a spruce seed year every seed should be
gathered. Pecks of hard maple seeds are swept up by street cleaners
every year on our home street. They are worth a lot of money, yet the
boys on the street never have all the cash they want to buy baseball
gloves and circus tickets and bicycles. No enterprising reader of this
book need ever lack for pocket money.
Remember, Professor Gifford said, "Collection of tree seeds should
yield good returns _if properly conducted_." Every business to
be successful must be conducted properly. There are some simple
principles. You need not be an expert forester but the more you know
about trees the better. If a dealer buys six quarts of _red_ maple
seeds of you he will be disappointed if you send him _silver_ maple,
discouraged if you send him _sugar_ maple, and disgruntled if you send
him _ash_. Furthermore, he will not send you the money nor any orders
for more. If there is a maple tree with a peck of seed on it in your
yard, in five minutes or less time you can find out what kind it is
with "The Tree Book." Before the seeds are ripe write to a several seed
men and tell them what you have; ask if they want any, at what price,
and on what date. Some trees ripen their seeds in the spring, shake
them off, and let the wind scatter them. In the case of some kinds,
the seeds sprout within a few days after they reach the ground. These
should be gathered as soon as ripe, spread out to dry for a few days,
and planted within a few weeks at latest. Seeds of other kinds do not
grow till the following spring. None of these should be allowed to dry
too thoroughly. Nuts and acorns for seed should not be allowed to get
dry over winter. These should be packed in moist sand and kept cool but
not frozen. Cherry, plum and peach pits are better for being frozen.
The supply of white pine seed is never equal to the demand. The market
price is said to vary from two dollars fifty cents to four dollars
fifty cents per pound. You get a little over a pound of seeds from a
bushel of unopened cones. White pine trees require two years to mature
their cones and they set seed only once in every four or five years.
But every year there will be some trees bearing seed. Nineteen hundred
and four was a big "on" year in the New York white pine forests. You
can tell when the tiny cones first appear that a crop is coming. The
cones should be watched as August wanes and gathered before they open.
September is the month as a general thing. Boys can earn thirty cents
or so a bushel gathering the full cones. But I should not be satisfied
to let the other fellow get all the profits just because he knows how
to cure and market the seed. That is easy. Spread the cones out in the
barn to dry. Slat trays are best to get free circulation of air. You
can make these at odd times before the crop is ready. A fanning mill
comes in handy to thrash and free them from rubbish and imperfect seed.
Market them immediately to avoid loss. If you are to keep the seed for
home consumption, mix with dry sand and store in a cool but not too dry
place. If allowed to dry or freeze and thaw they lose their vitality.
Tree seeds need pretty careful handling.
Any one interested in gathering tree seeds should get information from
books and bulletins on forestry. He should write to firms who make
a specialty of selling tree seeds and they will help him by giving
directions about the treatment of seeds.
Did you ever wonder where the nursery men get the thousands of apple
trees they sell every year? Go a step back of the budding or grafting
that is done in the nursery. Where did the little tree come from whose
top was cut off after the first bud was set? It came from a seed; just
any apple seed. And where do apple seeds come from? From apples? Yes,
just any apples. Did you ever make cider on your farm? You put in whole
apples, skin, core, stem, seeds, and all; shovelled them into the
hopper. The pulp was squeezed dry and thrown away, wasn't it, at your
cider mill? That is proof of the wastefulness of some good farmers. If
the pulp were washed in tubs, the seeds would find the bottom (or the
top) and they would bring a good price per pound.
COLLECTING CHRISTMAS GREENS
Once upon a time everybody who wanted Christmas greens had the fun of
gathering his own. That was in the generation when all the grandmothers
lived in the country and only the plain fathers and mothers and
children lived in the cities. But now we children have grown up and
our children want to go to grandmother's house for Christmas just as
we did. Can't you imagine how surprised and disappointed they are to
find their grandmothers living in city houses, even in flats? Didn't
we tell them about going out to gather holly and mistletoe and ground
pine and hemlock and even how we used to cut the Christmas tree itself
in grandpa's woods? In the middle West where Christmas trees do not
grow in the woods we used to choose a shapely young oak. To make it
look like an evergreen we used to get grandpa to go out with his big
jack-knife and cut off the largest branches he could spare from the
evergreens in the door yard. With good, strong twine we tied these
to the branches of the oak. When all the decorations were on and the
oranges and the apples and the popcorn strings and the candles _and_
the presents, we children who had never seen a real live Christmas tree
couldn't have told the difference. We didn't even mind the fact that
some of the oak's outer branches were pine, some were spruce, some were
cedar. It was all evergreen to us and all Christmassy. We were easy to
please.
But now--alas! The gathering of Christmas greens has been
commercialized. It has ceased to be fun, and has become a business. The
boys and girls may share in the profits and perhaps get some fun out
of it if they go about it right.
Holly, which of all the Christmas greens is the most popular, is a
hardy and beautiful tree, which grows wild in great numbers in the
Southern states and in the Chesapeake region. Many country boys and
girls make easy Christmas money from the holly trees in their own
woods. To these boys and girls I want to say "Don't kill the goose that
lays the golden egg." A tree with fine berries on it this year will,
if treated right, produce a good crop again in a few years. Pruning is
good for a tree, but brutally hacking its head out destroys the tree's
future, and the boy who does it is not a good citizen.
Holly wood is close grained, light, and tough and is valuable in some
forms of cabinet work. Here is an industry that might be developed as a
side issue in the holly trade.
The best market calls for holly wreaths. I have a picture of a girl
of fourteen who can make sixty wreaths in a day and she gets six and
a half cents for each. That is good wages for a girl of her age, but
she must get pretty tired making wreaths every minute all day long.
If she could help her brothers gather the holly for part of the time,
it would be easier on her back. The wreaths are made on frames of
twigs, twisted into circles, and tied. Young twigs of any flexible
shrub are used. Somebody has to gather these. It is a wonder that more
holly trees are not planted in door yards. And wouldn't it be a good
idea for some boys to begin a plantation of holly now so they can reap
the harvest later? Holly will not go out of fashion in a great many
years. But at the present rate the supply cannot last. The amount used
every year is past belief. From one small railway station 150,000
wreaths! One year, several carloads were burned because the market was
overstocked.
The time has come already when raising Christmas trees is necessary.
They still come up like weeds in the woods where enough mature ones
are left to seed the bared hillsides. The harvest begins in November
and the trees are cut and sorted, roped to preserve their branches,
in bundles of eight or less or singly, and stacked along the roads
to await shipment. Hundreds of thousands are harvested every year.
"No-Christmas-tree" clubs are being formed now to try to stop this
wastefulness. We go too much to extremes. One Christmas tree used to be
enough for all the grandchildren; but nowadays every one must have his
own. If our children's children are to have real Christmas trees the
boys of to-day must plant the seeds of the beloved balsam fir.
The man who discovers and makes popular a new kind of Christmas greens
does everybody a good turn. One of the most remarkable "ten-strikes"
ever made along this line was a sort of accident. A man who calls
himself "Caldwell, the woodsman," describes his experience as follows:
"It was several weeks before I found the evergreen that was to make
the town of Evergreen, Ala., famous throughout the decorative world.
Wandering through the woods one day, my attention was attracted to a
beautiful green vine hanging from the topmost limb of a small dead oak.
I caught hold of the vine and pulled it down, and was much astonished
at the ease with which it came out of the tree, and the fact that it
seemed in no way injured by my rough treatment. On carrying it to
my new home, I arranged it around the mirror in my room, and, after
leaving it there for about a week or ten days, found that it was as
fresh and green as ever."
Mr. Caldwell saw that in wild Southern smilax he had found a plant that
possessed all the good points required for wholesale decorations. It
is used everywhere now. City florists cannot get enough of it. The
plant is a perennial, renewing itself every year, and grows in greatest
profusion in its wild habitat. He had an uphill job, though, convincing
the fashionable florists of the value of this plant. But he persevered
and now he ships five thousand cases of it a year at an average profit
of one dollar per case.
Young long-leaf pines grow in the South and are now used extensively
for Christmas decoration in the North. It seems a pity to kill a pine
tree every time one of these is cut, but in places where the seedlings
come up too thick for good forest growth cutting out some is a benefit.
If only the gatherers would be conservers as well!
The collecting of ferns in the woods is a business suited to the
country boys and girls. This has grown to a really great enterprise
since the rage for country things has struck city people. There is
some sham about every fad of this kind, but the fern gatherers are not
shamming. They do the real work. To succeed in this, one must not work
haphazard. He must know just what his customer wants, and the buyer
must know just what the collector can supply. _Ferns_ is a big group of
plants, and some of them you couldn't sell. If Christmas ferns grow
plentifully in your woods, you can gather them by the thousand fronds.
But will the florist buy those leaves which have the brown spots (or
spores) on the under side? Find out before you waste your time. Those
spores are more valuable in the woods than on the garbage heap. The
boys who pull the plants up by the roots are killing their own goose.
The fern can spare all the perfect leaves you find on it in the fall
without much if any damage. A new crop will be forthcoming next year
if the roots are undisturbed. Scissors and care used in gathering only
good leaves will pay now, as well as in the future.
There are a number of wild things that deserve more popularity.
Bitter-sweet is lovely and lasts forever, nearly. You seldom see it
in the market, though. Sumach too, has great decorative value, yet
whoever saw it in a florist's window? Cattails, pussy willows, spice
bush, dogwood flowers and berries, Solomon's seal, and a score of other
wild flowers are already in use. But there are others you may be able
to introduce to city people. It is surprising what they will buy and
admire if it comes from the country. I rode on a suburban car one day
behind an armful of poison ivy. It was brilliantly beautiful and I
suspect the gatherer wished I had kept still when I told her what it
was. If she hadn't had a child with her, I should have let her risk it.
Maybe she was immune. Most people are. The funniest thing I ever saw
for sale was a basket of skunk-cabbage flowers on Broadway. The shrewd
old farmer who had them for sale got a quarter for two. He called them
Japanese lilies.
I wonder that the winter berry has not found more favour for
decoration. Two kinds of shrubs with this name are common in our
Northern woods. They are both hollies, but, unlike the Southern holly,
lose their leaves. One has bright orange-coloured berries, the other
is covered with a great profusion of bright scarlet fruits. Nothing
could be more effective in a large vase in a dark corner. They light up
handsomely at night or in the sunlight.
MEDICINAL PLANTS
There are a good many kinds of aromatic roots and medicinal plants
which are kept in stock at drug stores. Some of them are rare and bring
a good price; like golden seal at a dollar or over per pound. Digitalis
in the drug store is foxglove in the garden; but who ever thinks of
gathering its leaves and finding a market for them? Somebody must or
the supply would run out. The leaves of the second year's growth are
dried for medicinal uses.
Wild ginger root is used in preserves and for confectionery. I have
seen it in market and wondered who gathered it. Preserved calamus root,
too; who buys that unless it is Br'er Rabbit? There is a Bulletin
of the Department of Agriculture on "Weeds Used in Medicine" that
you ought to have. The list of weeds used in medicine will certainly
surprise the unenlightened. How do you know that your doctor isn't
dosing you with burdock, dandelion, dock, pokeweed, foxglove, mullein,
tansy, boneset, catnip, horehound, fleabane, yarrow, or jimson weed?
All these and many more common weeds are collected by somebody, dried,
and used in medicine.
POKEWEED
Pokeweed roots are poisonous. The berries are not. They are used to
make a syrup with which to colour frosting for cakes and the like.
Receipts for this are to be found in many cook books. But the best
part of pokeweed is not the fruit. In early spring, when asparagus is
expensive and scarce, the pokeweed shoots grow rank and as thick as
your thumb in fence corners. They will take entire possession of a
large garden in two years if given the least encouragement. I cut the
stems when about a foot in height. They are covered with short leaves
which are best removed except at the end of the shoot. Cook exactly
like asparagus, and dress with butter or cream. They resemble asparagus
somewhat, but are more delicate in flavour and less woody in texture.
WALKING STICKS
I once knew a stubborn man who was convinced that an unproductive
orchard full of old gnarled trees on his place was good for nothing
but firewood. He had the trunks cut into stove lengths and then burned
the brush in ten huge piles. As the last pile was about to be fired, a
manufacturer of umbrella handles offered him ten dollars for what was
left. Imagine his feelings! Thousands of handsome walking sticks and
umbrella handles are made of apple, cherry, and such woods. The makers
cannot get enough of it and yet every year how much salable wood must
be burned in the form of prunings. There is a true story of a young man
in Florida who paid his way through college by collecting orange wood
suitable for walking sticks. This wood is still popular for the same
purpose, and the idea is worth passing along.
Roots of quaint or grotesque shape are often found in the woods and may
be used as handles of umbrellas or walking sticks. I have a stick made
of a small sapling upon which a branch of bitter-sweet had entwined.
As the sapling grew in circumference, the coils of the climber had not
been loosened but had become imbedded in the wood of the little tree.
The long vine was not cut off, but trimmed and wound round and round
at the head of the stick to make it large enough to grasp comfortably.
Such a stick is an interesting gift for a friend.
[Illustration: Walking sticks decorated by nature]
Another pretty bit of nature's handiwork is a walking stick engraved by
the engraver beetle. These little insects make their burrows just under
the bark and they often work on small branches of a great variety of
forest trees. Remove a bit of loose bark and ten to one you will find
it carved with a more or less intricate design by the engraver beetle.
Could you do as neat a piece of work? A thorough brushing and oiling
are all that such a stick needs to make it an ornament to the hat-rack.
Sticks intended for handles or canes cannot be bent when dry. They
should be steamed until flexible or buried in hot, wet sand till you
can shape them. Boiling for a half-hour will sometimes make a piece
supple. Fasten in the desired shape with stout cords and dry thoroughly
before releasing. Sticks that are slightly crooked may be straightened
by putting them into a bundle with perfectly straight pieces and
winding with strong rope; let them dry in this bundle. Sticks which
are to be peeled should be partially dried first but not by artificial
heat. Rapid drying is likely to split the stick.
WILD FLOWERS FOR CITY CHILDREN
Children who live in the country part or all of the year do not know
how much pleasure they might give if they would gather wild flowers
and send them to city children. There is a society which distributes
flowers thus collected in New York but maybe there is none in the
city near you. The commonest flowers, even the weeds like daisies and
dandelions and black-eyed Susans, are eagerly taken home by children
who are so poor that they never even saw a park, much less a meadow. In
one city school over two hundred children had never seen a dandelion.
A lady once started with a bunch of daisies to give to a city friend.
She was met at the ferry with, "Please give me a flower." She went on
up the street. "Won't chu gimme one o'yer flowers?" Children seemed to
appear from every direction; maybe they were always there and she had
not noticed them before. The grown-up friend did not get any flowers
but she got a good story instead. Mr. Jacob Riis founded a flower
mission on a similar experience. It is fun to gather flowers anyhow,
and if you can make some other child happy even for a few minutes it
would be even more fun. This is only a hint.
SHELF FUNGI
Have you seen those outgrowths on dying and dead trees which stand out
like a shelf? They are called bracket or shelf fungi. If you have an
artist friend who can make beautiful things on these by carving them
with little engraving tools, gather all you see for her.
[Illustration: Photograph by Verne Morton. Gathering Wild Flowers for
City Children]
DANDELION GREENS
Do your folks cook dandelion greens? Mine never did but since seeing
them for sale at so much per half-peck I have come to think that they
must be eatable and have wished we had gathered and sold the bushels
that grew in our lawn.
CORN HUSKS
Corn husks is a crop that used to be more eagerly harvested than now.
In the corn belt, where the husking is done in the field, the husk is
left on the stalk and would therefore be hard to get. But where corn
is snapped, husk and all, and left to be husked at leisure in field
or barn, the husks can be saved with profit. For summer beds they are
cheaper and softer than hay. For porch cushions they are far superior
to excelsior. For braiding into mats they are really valuable, and
well-made ones bring a good price.
Cornstalks yield another crop that is little known. Collectors of
insects use thin sheets of cornstalk pith to line their insect boxes.
It is peculiarly adapted to this purpose. They cannot get a large
supply of it, yet what boy in any great corn state could not get a ton
of it if he had the gumption. Ask the entomology man in your state
Experiment Station, if he needs cornstalk pith. If you live in a cactus
country, ask him if he could use thin slices of the pith from the
flower stalk of the giant cacti.
FRAGRANT HERBS AND GRASSES
Of the fragrant herbs, grasses, and shrubs which nature provides,
nothing is more in demand than sweet grass. In the parts of the country
where it is abundant, people still gather and cure it and make useful
baskets and mats of it. Sometimes it is combined with birch bark or
porcupine quills or both by skilful Indian women who learned how from
their grandmothers. The good market for such things will keep the art
of basket making from becoming a lost one.
Indian maidens are not the only ones who have learned basket weaving.
Indeed this has almost taken the place of patchwork, for girls, except
in very old-fashioned families. Clever girls will not be content to use
only such conventional materials as raffia and reeds. Often the colours
of those you buy are so crude that you cannot make really artistic
things of them. Some of the native grasses, flower stalks, strips of
palmetto, rushes, soft inner corn husks, cat-tail leaves, and sedges
are used. One basket maker has used the shiny brown stems of maidenhair
ferns and the effect is very pretty. Another uses long pine needles in
her weaving. Most of these materials are unfit for use when dry and
brittle, but books on basketry tell just how they can be made pliable.
Grasses are usually at their best just after flowering.
The dried leaves of sweet fern, sweet clover in blossom, balsam fir,
and bayberry make sweet smelling cushions and bags for bureau drawers
and couches.
BALSAM LEAVES
In gathering what you hear called "pine needles" for pillows be sure
you have the right kind of trees before you begin to gather the leaves.
Pine needles are long and stiff and sharp. A pillow made of dried
ones would not be a very fragrant nor a very comfortable thing. What
you want is the short, soft leaves of balsam fir. These retain their
wholesome odour after being dried. In five minutes you can learn to
tell the balsam from spruce, hemlock, and cedar, the other common
short-leaved native evergreens.
BIRCH BARK
Camping parties often leave a trail of devastation behind them which
would shock the most hardened and wasteful one of the lot. This is
largely if not entirely because they are ignorant, not because they
are intentionally breakers of the laws of the woods. Indeed they are
probably very ardent believers in the theory of conservation. Has it
never occurred to them to practise it?
In the matter of collecting birch bark much damage has been done.
Some people in whom you have confidence say: "Oh, no. It doesn't hurt
the tree." So you strip off layer after layer; such a fascinating
occupation, I do not wonder you hardly know when to stop. But read what
Miss Rogers says in "The Tree Book:" "The feminine tourist in Northern
woods loses no time in supplying herself with birch bark note-paper.
The bark is usually removed in thick plates, from which the thin sheets
may be stripped at leisure. These sheets are orange-coloured, with a
faint purplish bloom upon them and darker purplish lines. Alas! for the
zeal of these tourists. They usually cut too deep, and the strip that
tears off so evenly girdles and kills the tree, because nothing is left
to protect the living cambium. A black band (of mourning) soon marks
the doomed tree, and it eventually snaps off in the wind."
I know a girl who killed thirty-seven beautiful birch trees before any
one showed her how she could get plenty of bark and leave some for the
tree beside. She was perfectly horrified when she realized what she had
done. So few people know that the live part of the tree is not at the
heart--that is quite dead--but just under the skin. Cut off the bark in
any large quantities and your tree falls an easy prey to disease.
Hiawatha was not the first Indian to use the canoe birch for practical
purposes. His ancestors used this bark for all sorts of utensils,
dishes, baskets, buckets, and for their canoes. They sewed the pieces
together with fibrous roots and filled the cracks with wild gum
or pitch. The Indians of nowadays have degenerated and the things
they make have become less artistic. I lately saw a buckskin pouch,
decorated with exquisitely woven bead work, in simple but charming
design. It was a piece of real Indian handiwork, but the whole effect
was spoiled by a lining of coarse red and blue and green gingham and
the pouch flap was secured by a thong looped over a large white agate
shirt button!
In trying to imitate the Indians at their game of making things out
of birch bark, quills, sweet grass, and other natural materials, let
us keep clear of the shops and use only what combines naturally and
artistically.
PORCUPINE QUILLS
"Give me of your quills, O hedgehog!" Hiawatha was talking to a
porcupine, for the chances are that he never saw a hedgehog. Poets
ought to know better than to confuse their "critters."
A real Indian boy in the woods knows that porcupines give up their
quills all too willingly. It is strange that the wild beasts of prey
and the domestic dogs cannot learn this and let the porcupine alone.
They have no quarrel with him. He eats the bark of trees, and goes
about his own affairs. There isn't a word of truth in the story of his
shooting his quills. No doubt he would if he could, if sore pressed,
but he can't. He bristles them up when attacked and then woe be to
the tender nose that touches the sharp points! The quills let go of
their original owner very easily, but being barbed on their outer end
they bury themselves in the soft parts of the attacking animal. With
no thought of revenge in his rather witless head, the porcupine may
pronounce the death sentence on his captor.
Porcupines are hunted for their quills and easily captured by men as
they are slow and awkward. The quills take a pretty polish and their
cream white and shaded brown colours blend softly with the tints of
birch bark and wild grasses with which they are combined by basket and
mat weavers.
MAPLE SUGAR MAKING
Most of the fifty million or so pounds of maple sugar made in this
country is made in six states, Vermont, New York, Ohio, Michigan,
Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire. The boys and girls of these states
have exceptional opportunities of studying the mysteries of tree life
and of sharing the bounty the maples provide. I was not brought up
in any one of the above-named states, yet I remember the maple sugar
making in the woods along the river. One of my early recollections is
of a party of Indian women, on piebald ponies, bringing fascinating
heart-shaped cakes of maple sugar to exchange at the farm for fresh
meat. Theirs were no pale, anæmic, delicate squares of creamy texture,
but ruddy and hard. Less discriminating than now, we children ate with
relish the coarse sugar almost black from the bits of bark, chips of
leaves, and twigs which had undoubtedly been boiled with it. Nor did we
innocents turn from it with loathing when told by a teasing uncle that
its colour was due to the sirup having been strained by the Indians
through their blankets. We didn't believe it then and I don't yet. How
very bad for the blankets!
The Indians discovered the maple sugar industry long before they
themselves were discovered by white people. They taught our New
England ancestors how to tap the trees and boil down the sirup and how
to "sugar off." They had little or no sugar except what the maples
supplied. The Indians had very primitive ways of tapping the trees,
collecting the sap, boiling, and sugaring. These ways have been
improved in the last three hundred years. Although wooden buckets and
home-made spiles made of sumach branches may still be used where only a
few trees are tapped, the up-to-date sugar maker has modern, patent,
covered buckets, spouts, and evaporators. He uses a thermometer and
knows "for sure" when to shut off his fire if he wants to make sirup,
and how high the temperature may go to make the best sugar. He knows,
too, whether he can afford to make sugar which tests eighty per cent.
or ninety per cent. pure and get the bounty, if his state pays one, or
if it costs him less labour and expense to sell his entire product in
the form of sirup.
But scientific methods can never take away the charm of maple sugar
making. There is so much yet to be learned from the trees about the
whys and wherefores of their behaviour during the harvest, that our
interest in maple products increases as our interest in mere "sweets"
decreases.
If you have a "sugar bush" planted by your great-grandfather, the
chances are that you have had annual opportunities to help in making
sugar, ever since you could drive a horse on frosty mornings to collect
the sap. But I am going to suppose that during the winter you have
been reading "Trees Every Child Should Know" and have been identifying
the trees about your home. The maples are about the easiest trees to
identify when leafless. Suppose you have found several maple trees,
good big ones, right in your own door yard. The hard or sugar maple is
the one most frequently used for sugar making, but experiments show
that soft maples make good sugar too. It isn't worth while to tap trees
in winter. The sugar is in them all right because the leaves were
storing up the starch all summer. This starch has been changed to sugar
in the living cells of the wood. But you couldn't get any of it until
the sap begins to run. It does this with the first warm, sunny days of
February.
After locating all the trees you expect to tap, you must make some
preparations so that you will not lose any time at the critical moment.
I knew one boy who got his bit and brace out the first thing, bored
a hole in the tree trunk, and lost about a gallon of sap before he
could get a spile and a pail ready to catch it. You want a spile or
spout for every pail and a pail for every tree. The patent spouts have
a hook upon which the bucket hangs. If you use sumach spiles you may
have to set the bucket on the ground where it is likely to get dirt in
it, tip over, and it is so far from the spile that the wind blows the
sap away from the pail entirely. The pails should be generous in size
unless you expect to collect the sap more than once a day. An average
yield per day is five quarts per hole. The pails and spiles should be
in readiness before "sugar weather" begins. Beside the pails and spouts
you need a wooden mallet, and a bit and brace or small auger for the
outdoor work; a kettle for boiling down, a large jar to put the fresh
sap in, and a dipper to dip it out, a strainer and a skimmer for the
indoor work. If you boil your sap outdoors using cheap fuel you will
make more out of your enterprise than if you use coal or gas. A good
sap-running day is a warm, sunny day after a frosty night. While the
days and nights are about the same temperature the sap does not run
much.
The best place to tap a tree is about four feet from the ground, and
fortunately that is the easiest place to work with the auger or bit.
The bit should be bright and sharp; a dull, rusty bit makes a shabby
hole in the wood with a lot of woody shreds which clog the flow of sap.
Clean out the hole, as any chips left in stop the flow in the same
way. The bit or auger used should be about one half inch in diameter.
A bigger hole might give more sap but would injure the tree more. The
tree fills up the smaller hole in a few years with new tissue. The
hole should not be deeper than three inches. It is a mistake to think
that the centre of the tree holds the sap. As a matter of fact there
is less there than anywhere else and more as you near the surface. The
living, active part of the tree is just under the bark. It is necessary
to say this over and over again so that people will get it into their
minds. The Indians used to tap the trees on the south side because
they said more sap came from that side. Experiments show that on warm,
sunny days, this is the case. On cloudy days, however, sap comes about
equally from holes on all sides. If the trees have been tapped before,
it is best to tap at some distance from the old places. The size of the
auger and spile should be the same and the latter should be forced in
tightly, and not fall out when the pail is full.
Pure sap makes the clearest sirup and the lightest-coloured sugar.
Every bit of dust, leaves, twigs, or bark that gets into the pail
leaves its mark on the sugar even though strained out. So covers on
the pails are preferred if one can afford them. Most of the sap runs
between nine o'clock in the morning and noon. It has been found by
tests that this morning sap has more sugar in it than that which runs
later in the day. It is the custom in some places to throw away the ice
if the sap freezes. This is very wasteful, for this ice contains about
thirty per cent. of the sugar. Of course, melting ice is expensive
business so one must try not to let his sap freeze. The sap in the
storage jar or tank must not be allowed to get warm, though, as it may
sour. It should be boiled as soon after gathering as possible to ensure
best results.
Maple sap contains other ingredients beside water and sugar. In
boiling, the water passes off in steam and the sugar and other solids
remain. The changes in colour from clear sap to dark brown sugar is
caused by the action of the heat upon the sugar and other substances.
All sugar makers know that the lightest coloured sirup and sugar can
be made from the earliest run of sap. That is because, as the season
advances, more of the lime, potash, magnesia, and other substances are
present in the sap. You see the tree does not stop work just because
you tap it; and the sap is changing every day until, by the time the
buds begin to open, the sap is so changed that it does not make good
sugar at all.
Water boils when it reaches two hundred and twelve degrees, Fahrenheit,
as any thermometer will tell you. In fact, you cannot heat water
hotter than two hundred and twelve degrees, for at that temperature
the water becomes steam. A mixture of sugar and water will not boil
at two hundred and twelve degrees but requires a higher temperature.
Therefore, as the water passes off the sap in boiling, and as the
amount of sugar per gallon increases, it gets hotter and hotter. It is
necessary to watch boiling sap carefully to avoid burning. In making
sirup it is important to have it just thick enough to taste right and
not so thick that it will granulate. Sirup that weighs eleven pounds to
the gallon has long been considered as "just right," and it has been
found by testing that if you take the sirup off the fire just as soon
as the thermometer registers two hundred and nineteen degrees it will
weigh eleven pounds to the gallon and will not granulate. If you take
it off when the thermometer says two hundred and sixteen degrees your
sirup will be a pretty fair article, but you cannot expect to get as
good a price for it, because it has more water in it than there should
be in a prime article.
When the sirup has boiled down to nearly two hundred and nineteen
degrees, it is necessary to pour it off or strain it through thick
cloths to take out the dark-coloured impurities. After this the sirup
is heated again to boiling point and sealed in jars or cans.
A gallon of sirup will make between eight and ten pounds of sugar.
Can you afford to make your sirup into sugar at this rate? It will
depend upon the relative price of sugar and sirup, the cost of your
fuel and the value of your time and whether your market wants sugar or
sirup. There is a good and increasing demand for pure maple products,
especially in the form of confectionery. If you can work up a market
for fancy maple sugar in the form of bonbons it will bring a fancy
price. This is not so hard as it sounds but it takes enterprise and
gumption and perseverance and knack. Here is a job where brothers and
sisters can work together to very great advantage and add to their
store of college money by discovering and harvesting a crop right at
home which in many cases has been neglected for decades. If you have
city cousins they will help you sell your products among their mates.
It will pay you to prepare small sample parcels, enough to whet the
appetite but not enough to satisfy. I remember receiving a number of
packages of maple cream from a Vermont friend. The price per pound
was equal to that of the finest candy and I wanted to share with all
my friends. But I couldn't afford to give away pound packages to
everybody. I might have created a large demand for this delicious
confectionery, had I been able to get sample packages to give to
friends. This year I am to have them.
It adds wonderfully to the attractiveness of maple sugar to have each
cake or bonbon wrapped in its own piece of waxed paper. This is a kind
of guarantee of dainty handling that is appreciated by the purchaser.
A shoe box is hardly a dainty parcel, yet I know of one unimaginative
maple sugar man who packs his cakes in just such boxes. There is a
chance for some one to "make a hit" in this line.
WILD RICE
Wild rice sells for two or three times the price of ordinary rice and
the supply never meets the demand.
"But who wants it and what for?"
Wild rice is not likely to become a popular breakfast food except
among the Ojibways, yet a lot of time and effort have been spent on
trying to find out how to grow crops of it. The reason for this is
that nothing fattens wild ducks, geese, and other game birds quite so
satisfactorily. Where the wild rice flourishes there is the hunter's
paradise in September. This is reason enough for wanting to grow wild
rice. When our true American sportsmen awoke to the fact that game was
scarce and realized why, they set about protecting the wild fowl and
studying their habits so as to better supply ideal conditions for the
remnant to increase. This is conservation and boys that help in such
enterprises are truly patriotic citizens.
Wild rice grows in swamps, shallow lakes, and sluggish rivers covering
immense areas in the Mississippi Valley and the middle North-western
states. Mud is a necessity to its growth. It grows taller than a man's
height above the water and its seed comes in a loose spray at the very
top of each stalk. The plants die every year and new ones come up from
seed. The grain begins to ripen early in September and keeps on until
heavy frosts. This is all right for ducks but it makes harvesting a
very difficult task. The Indian women of the wild rice regions go out
and shake the heads over their boats. They have to go again and again.
If they left it till all the grain had ripened they would get very
little seed, because the wild rice falls as soon as it is ripe and lies
in the mud till spring. The long-hid secret of the many failures to get
wild rice to grow from seed was discovered by some scientist to be this
habit of lying in the mud over winter. Thoroughly dried seed does not
germinate.
Wild rice is queer looking stuff. The grains are black and very long
and slender. Some of them are an inch long. It is said by some to be
very good eating, especially as prepared by the Indians. They parch it
usually, but sometimes it is made into a sort of porridge and eaten
with maple sugar.
Practically, the best market for wild rice will always be amongst
the wild fowl and it is a sportsman-like act to gather the seed and
propagate it for their sake.
GATHERING SPRUCE GUM
If spruce gum were used only in the manufacture of "chewing-gum"
we had much better let the crop go unharvested. It serves a useful
purpose in the tree which produces it. When you have a cut or bruise
you like to put something on it that excludes the air. The tree acts
on the same principle. The live part of the tree is just underneath
the bark. Trees are liable to many kinds of injuries. The winter winds
strain them sometimes to the point of splitting, a heedless woodsman
blazes the bark in passing, wild creatures gnaw or scratch the trunks,
a woodpecker digs a hole through the bark. Any injury of the living
layer is like a "hurry call" to the cells where the resin is stored.
These cells are the health department. They send out to the injured
part a covering of balm, a salve which seals the wound effectually from
contact with the air. We cannot say that the tree knows that the air is
full of the germs of decay and that to let them get a foothold means
decay and sure death; but the tree has something that serves the same
purpose as knowledge.
Physicians make use of the resinous gums in preparing medicines, and
druggists always try to keep a stock of spruce gum on hand. Collectors
find their best market for it in the drug trade. The best quality
brings as high as one dollar and fifty cents a pound, while one dollar
a pound is not too much to expect for the average collection.
All the spruces yield gum, but the best quality is said to come from
the white spruce. The first thing to do then is to learn to recognize
this tree on sight. It will take you and a tree book together about
five minutes to distinguish between the three short-leaved evergreens
which look so much alike to a novice, the firs, the hemlocks, and the
spruces. When once you know the spruces by the looks or the feel, you
will begin to know the white from the red and black spruce by the
colour. Everything about the white spruce is paler than the others.
The foliage is light, almost pea-green, and the bark is not ruddy but
grayish-brown. There are thousands of acres of spruce woods in our
northern Central and New England states. Boys and girls on camping
trips can sometimes collect spruce gum enough to pay expenses and have
fun doing it. The only equipment necessary is a heavy pocket knife, a
gum spud, a canvas sack, a strong hand, and a pair of sharp eyes. The
eyes will get sharper as the knife gets dull and the tree you found
nothing on in the morning of your first day may yield a good harvest on
the return trip. You will not be able to buy a gum spud, but a tinsmith
can make one for you at small cost, according to these directions:
Solder a piece of galvanized iron into a funnel six inches deep, three
inches across the top, and one inch in diameter at the bottom. A
ferrule two or three inches deep and an inch in diameter is fitted into
the bottom of the funnel and soldered in tight. Fit a long handle into
this affair and your spud is ready. You may count on a good majority of
the gum you find being out of reach of the knife but the spud gets it
down very successfully.
The best place to find spruce gum is undoubtedly in woods where no
one has been "gummin'" before, at least not for five years or so. The
most plentiful supply is said to be on slopes where the trees have a
southern exposure, and the smaller trees yield more gum than the big
ones. Your work is not done with collecting, for in order to get the
best price you must present a fancy grade to the market. If your gum
is all thrown in together, good, bad, and indifferent, your average
price is pretty sure to be less than for a carefully cleaned and sorted
lot.
Spruce gum can be collected in summer or winter. Which time is better
for you depends on circumstances. There is a peculiar charm about gum
hunting on snow-shoes. A young man suffering from too little fresh air
and attendant ills might find his health among the spruce trees while
the gum paid the bills.
MUSHROOMS
"Are you sure these are good mushrooms?" I asked my seven-year-old
daughter.
"Yes. I'm sure. Don't you know Aunt J---- says that all the _Coprinæ_
are edible?"
This is a true story and it only goes to show that even a small child
can learn that there are a small number of unmistakable mushrooms,
which are edible and there is never any danger of being wrong about
them. The puff-balls, for example, are all good to eat. When we found
the neighbour's children kicking great white spongy puff-balls in the
pasture we begged them to let us have them instead. "Pap says they're
p'ison" was their reply, but we heeded them not for their "pap" was
no oracle of ours. We were quite willing the children should go on
thinking puff-balls were poison, if only they would not use them for
foot-balls. Nobody in his senses would try to eat puff-balls after they
have begun to turn black or brown. But when they are white and tender
they are very good. Skin the ball, slice thin, add water and a little
salt, and stew for twenty minutes or so. Drain and dress with cream
sauce. No doubt puff-ball slices broiled over a camp fire with bacon
would be good. I wish I had tried it, but I never have. We will agree
that no puff-ball can compare with the pink-gilled meadow mushroom, but
we make no such claims for it.
The best place to look for puff-balls is in old pastures in late summer
and early fall. The giants are sometimes as big as a milk pail. The
pear-shaped ones grow on tree stumps and are as big as your fist or
smaller. There is an endless variety of tiny ones of all sorts which
are either too tough or too small to bother with. But no puff-ball is
"p'ison," not one.
Boys and girls who like to harvest nature's crops are missing a lot
of fun besides many pecks of delicious food by neglecting the common
edible mushrooms. If you know a few good ones you are perfectly safe.
When you have seen them a few times and gathered them a few times and
compared them with photographs you are ready to eat them. I should
advise always to go mushroom hunting first with some experienced
person. Personally I take no risks. For instance if my book tells me
that "dangerous fungi resembling this species and sometimes found in
company with it--etc.," that's enough. Say no more. I let that one
alone. I do not like the company it keeps, and it may be a sheep in
wolf's clothing. In my list of edible fungi, common in New York and
New Jersey, there are less than a dozen kinds. No one of these looks
enough like any other fungus to be mistaken for it. A few good looks at
them will fix them in the memory. These are morels, meadow mushrooms,
shaggy-manes, inky-caps, oyster mushroom, puff-balls, coral fungi,
and chanterelles. The open season for morels is in early spring, when
arbutus is blossoming, and later. Coral fungi and chanterelles are
at their finest in midsummer, puff-balls in September, inky-caps and
shaggy-manes in October, and we ate oyster mushrooms on January first
one year, though they appear earlier. The meadow mushroom with white
flesh and pink gills is grown indoors and is seen in the market from
fall till spring, but nature's crop must be harvested in fall before
frost.
_Morels._--Morels look like nothing else. When full sized they are six
inches high. The hollow stalk is as large as your finger and about half
the length of the whole. The top or cap is brownish and so covered with
ridges and wrinkles that it would never be mistaken for anything else
in the world. You ought to see a picture of it because it is difficult
to describe so irregular an object. Look it up in some mushroom book or
bulletin in your library.
[Illustration]
You never know just where morels may appear. We found them in our
garden once. They come up right among the weeds or dead leaves. I have
often found them along forest by-paths, especially in wet weather in
spring. They are delectable. Perhaps you have eaten delicately broiled
slices of tenderloin of young pig. Morels do not taste like this--they
look a little like it--they taste very much better. You taste them.
_Coral Fungi._--The coral fungi that I eat look like chunks of pinkish
or cream white organ pipe coral. They are fleshy, soft, yet firm enough
to keep their shape, and the whole mass is made up of tiny thread-or
rod-like parts of many branches. There is a fine one which looks like a
cauliflower though more yellow. I have found the pink and creamy ones
on fallen and decayed tree trunks in deep, cool woods in midsummer.
Others equally good grow in thin woods or open places. They vary in
size from chunks as big as a walnut to those as big or bigger than
your fist. They need careful cleansing under a faucet. Some cooks soak
them first in cold water into which they put a little vinegar or lemon
juice. They then fry in butter. Another way is to stew till tender in
water with lemon juice in it. Then drain and dress with cream sauce.
_Puff-balls._--What country child has not puffed the "smoke" from the
hole in the top of the tough-skinned little brown balls they find in
the fields in autumn? Children generally believe them to be deadly
poison and call them "devil's snuff-boxes." Their life history is very
like that of other fungi. The most of the year these flowerless and
leafless plants spend underground. They spread in a tangle of fine
threads all through the soil wherever they find decaying vegetable
matter upon which to feed. When their time comes, little white balls
push out and up from the threads. These come to the surface and we know
them by their shapes and sizes as our different kinds of puff-balls,
mushrooms, or other fungi.
The puff-balls are white and look like fine cream cheese when they
first appear. Their business is to ripen their spores, scatter them,
and disappear. The brown smoke or dust of the ripe puff-ball is blown
about by the wind and finds its way into the earth in time; each tiny
spore or grain of dust can start a new mat of threads down underground.
When you puff the devil's snuff-box you are doing the plant just the
kindness it was waiting for. When a cow steps on a ripe giant puff-ball
a great smoke goes up, and the breeze catches the dust. Some of the
spores may be carried on the wind or on the cow's foot to far distant
pastures, there to settle down and start a new puff-ball colony. It is
just so with all the fungi.
All the puff-balls are edible but one of the most eatable is _the
giant_, which is found in August or September in pastures or other
grassy places. When right to eat it is grayish on the outside and pure
white clear through. In size this giant varies from six or eight inches
through to two feet. Specimens of ten pounds' weight are not rare, and
there is record of some twice that size. When yellow or brown inside,
the giant is past eating.
The _pear-shaped_ puff-ball is the commonest one. This is a sort of
dirty brown colour outside, pure white inside. It is found on old
wood or on the ground as early as July and as late as October. In size
the balls vary from thimble size to that of a big pear. They grow in
companies, sometimes scores together.
The _brain_ puff-ball is larger than the pear-shaped. The top is
wrinkled or corrugated, and grayish or reddish in colour.
_Chanterelles._--Chanterelles are found in late summer in the woods
amongst moss where it is damp and cool. They are red or yellow and look
as if you had put your thumb in the middle of the top and pushed it
down so that the network of gills appear on the outside. The name means
a little goblet, and the perfect ones are goblet-shaped. If you go
camping in the woods in summer you are almost sure to find chanterelles.
_Meadow Mushrooms._--The wild meadow mushroom usually appears in
large numbers after the autumn rains have renewed the pastures. They
frequently come up alongside of an old dried patch of cow manure. To
make myself familiar with this pink-gilled variety I visited a large
market where they had them for sale in all stages, from the little
round buttons to the big flat broilers which are turning brown. They
are just right when the cap has spread so as to burst the delicate
white veil which covers the gills. The flesh is white and the gills a
delicate pink. The skin peels off easily like that of a ripe peach.
Look them over with great care when preparing for the table. The early
worm which is on hand to get a first bite of everything sometimes
honeycombs the whole plant. The stems of young ones are tender at the
top.
_Inky Caps._--You never expect to gather your dinner from an ash heap?
Neither did I; but in the edge of the woods nearest us the public used
to be allowed to dump ashes. It is now overgrown with golden-rod, iron
weed and various other coarse plants. A path leads through it. Last
fall we discovered that the place was fairly swarming with _Coprinus
comatus_, the shaggy mane mushroom. This does not look like anything
else on land or sea and is delicious. Its relative, the inky cap is
just as good to eat, but not so handsome. Both melt away into black
ink as they grow old. They should be cooked as soon as possible after
gathering. We kept some over night once. Such a sight! They looked like
black corn smut.
The _Coprinæ_ push up in such tight clumps sometimes that their heads
are all out of shape. They rise literally over night. Sometimes
one comes up singly and grows tall and perfect, a truly lovely
object, pure white, six inches tall, its shaggy head held high, its
silver-white gills delicate as tissue paper. A few hours later you will
see a ragged bit of pulp rapidly dissolving in a pool of black ink.
_Oyster Mushrooms._--The oyster mushroom comes out like the shelf fungi
on decaying tree stumps or logs. They are ashy colour or dull white,
solid and rather tough, and vary in breadth from two to five inches. As
to why they are called oyster mushrooms, opinions differ. The flavour
is not oyster-like, though the flesh is about as tough as a boiled
oyster. The shape does suggest an oyster shell; perhaps that is the
best reason for the name. One edible relative of the oyster mushroom
grows usually on decaying elm stumps as late in the year as November.
The first thing to do if you get interested in mushrooms is to get
some good illustrated book on them. The chances are that your State
Experiment Station has issued a bulletin on the subject. If not you
can get those published by the United States Department of Agriculture
or perhaps those issued by some neighbouring state. What you want is
information on wild fungi, especially the edible ones, not directions
about growing the market varieties. When you write for bulletins state
just what you are looking for. Pictures, especially photographs, are
of the greatest use in identifying specimens. Compare the descriptions
and pictures with your mushrooms and do not use them if there is any
question in your mind as to what they are. The books mentioned in the
appendix of this book have been of help to me.
CONSERVING NATURE'S CROPS
The harvesting of nature's crops is a most fascinating occupation. As
boys and girls we do not ask why; we only know what fun it is. If the
time ever comes when you wish to forget that you are grown up, nothing
will help you like going into the woods, the fields, or the hedge-rows
to help the birds and the little fur-coated animals harvest the crops
of nuts or berries or other fruit that grow in nature's orchards. With
your sack of nuts or plums on your arm, or your pail full of berries,
you can easily forget that you live in a flat or work in an office or a
factory.
Some people think when they see how much over-ripe fruit is falling
to the ground, and how much more there is than can ever be gathered
by human hands, that nature is wasteful. Perhaps this is why these
same people and others who did not think at all, have been so very
wasteful of our country's natural resources, and brought about such a
really alarming state of things in our forests. Those who do stop to
think will see that although she is lavish, nature is never wasteful.
The berries must decay in order that the seeds may germinate, and in
moulding they nourish the fungi which are just as important in nature's
eyes, so to speak, as the berries are. Nothing is _wasted_ in nature.
On the contrary, everything is _saved_ and is made over into some other
form. Nothing stands still; transformation goes on continuously. What
was soil yesterday is fruit to-day and is built into our muscles and
nerves and brains to-morrow.
Every boy or girl that helps to harvest nature's crops can do a little
to assist in our great national work of preserving the country's
natural resources. Would you ruin a fine young tree just beginning a
life of usefulness? By mutilating it past recognition, you may add
a few nuts to your this year's store. But what an injustice you are
doing to the next generation of boys and girls. You are robbing them.
I have heard men say: "When I was a boy we used to bring home arbutus
by the wagon load from Coy Glen. But it's hard to find any there now.
It must have winter-killed or blighted." My tongue burned to tell them
that they themselves were the blight that winter-killed the arbutus and
robbed me of my right to gather a few sprays. They had torn it up by
the roots in their greed to fill their wagons, and then they cut out
all the trees, and the sunlight destroyed all the shade-loving things.
Boys and girls of a more enlightened generation know better ways and
will not leave behind them a record of selfishness.
THE STORY OF THE CREATION OF A NEW INDUSTRY
I am glad to tell the methods by which I have developed a good business
in collecting and growing California bulbs, as I believe my success
can be duplicated in other parts of the country--in fact, one man
already makes a good living by exploiting the wild flowers of the
Rocky Mountains, several people are exporting the cacti of our desert,
and there are several nurseries in the southern Appalachians for the
interesting plants of North Carolina.
In 1870, when I was nine years old, my family moved to Ukiah Valley in
north-western California, and there I have lived ever since. My early
home was a farm, and my first work to raise hops and a mortgage. My
education was such as the district school and an abundance of good
reading could give me. At eighteen I began to teach school. I was
always a lover of nature and fond of wandering about the hills. In
Mendocino County in 1870 the country was just emerging from the cowboy
era, and little attention was paid to vegetable gardening, while flower
gardens were all but unknown.
HOW THE LIFE WORK WAS DETERMINED
There was one notable exception to the indifference to flowers.
Alexander MacNab, a Scotchman who had been forced by declining health
to leave Glasgow, had found new vigour in California's mountains. The
property which he had purchased for a stock range is one of the most
picturesque in northern California, and there he built a modest but
ideal home. He sent everywhere for flowers, and I know of no place in
these later days where more flowers are well grown. He gave to his
flowers not only money, but love and himself, and few gardeners were
more successful. I often visited there in my boyhood days and the
inspiration that I received from this place and from another source
determined my life work.
I had a sister a few years older than myself who had been in the East
for some years and whose failing health forced her to return to
California. She was a flower-lover and soon called upon me to begin a
garden on the bare hill where our very plain home stood. It was a work
of love, for all of the new soil was carried in buckets, and the water
which our hot climate made necessary was carried from a well, but it
was a great success. My Scotch friend was most liberal with both plants
and instruction, and between the two my bent was well fixed.
THE BEGINNING OF THE INDUSTRY
It was through Mr. MacNab that I got started in the collection of
native plants. Woolson and Company, then of Passaic, N. J., were the
first American firm to take up the culture of our native American
plants as a specialty. They wrote to Mr. MacNab, asking him to secure
the native plants and offering to pay for them in eastern grown plants.
My love for flowers had interested me in botany, and it was quite
natural that the letter should be turned over to me. In my first letter
to Woolson I sent a pressed flower of _Colochortus pulchellus_ and
received in return an order for one hundred bulbs, which they said they
would pay for in cash. This order was filled and it was the beginning
of my bulb business.
My first idea was to earn money to buy plants with, but before long I
saw that a small business might be built up.
My progress as a collector went hand in hand with my education in
botany. My method was this: First to find something of sufficient
beauty to make it probable that it would be wanted; next, to find its
name, and then to offer it to some one of the very few firms then
interested in such things.
Such was the first stage in the development of a new industry, but the
latter was no less important, for it involved knowing the plant at
every stage of its growth, finding when it could best be handled, and
how best packed for shipment. Almost from the beginning I tried to grow
the native plants, and botanical study, collection, and cultivation
have gone hand in hand since.
METHODS OF COLLECTING
Every year I took longer trips. I went alone, with the lightest of
camping outfits, slept on the ground, and penetrated the wildest
regions, learning where the desirable flowers grew, and collecting
those in demand, at the same time studying the general flora. When I
had learned the flora of a region, I tried to train some resident as
a permanent collector, for not all of these long trips could be made
every year. My horizon fast widened, and through friends, by letters
to others, and often by the migration of men whom I had trained, new
fields were opened, and later I had men who had been trained under me
to send to distant points.
Before I began to collect, others had been in the field, but they were
principally wandering botanists who seldom collected over the same
ground for two years in sequence. Their collections were of stuff of
all grades, often made at the wrong season, and there was no demand
except from a few special lists. At first I shared their faults, but
after a few years I saw the necessity of making a reputation for
reliability, for thoroughly learning the art of packing, and for such
grading as would insure uniform quality.
ESTABLISHING A NURSERY BUSINESS
As time went on, collection became less important and culture the
central feature of my work.
My first garden was at the farm home; later I spent much time and money
in experiments in a reclaimed lake bed near Ukiah, still later at my
Ukiah home, and since 1897 in the mountains about eight miles east of
Ukiah. Each experiment had its value. No one had grown Californian
bulbs in California, and everything had to be learned experimentally.
I now have two nurseries. One of them is at Lyons Valley, a lovely
spot in the highest part of that branch of the Coast Range which I
found six years ago was specially adapted to lily culture. About three
quarters of a mile away, at "The Terraces," nature has provided endless
variations of soil, climate, moisture, sun, and shade. Here I grow a
great variety of bulbs.
In 1886 I sold about seven thousand plants of all sorts; in 1888,
two hundred and fifty thousand, and the difference was on business
principles.
CARL PURDY
III
RAISING DOMESTIC ANIMALS
RAISING COLTS
Every farm boy I ever knew was ambitious to own horses. Before my
eldest brother was twelve he had traded pigs with our father for
calves, then heifers for a horse, and his favourite air castles were
great luxurious barns inhabited by blooded horses of his own raising.
If your colt's mother is dutiful, and they mostly are, the youngster
will have plenty to eat for the first few weeks. Petting is a good
thing for little colts; never a cuff nor a harsh word. Their confidence
won, their education is begun. While still dependent on the mother for
milk the young colt begins to nibble hay from the manger, and gets a
taste of the oats in the feed box, too, and finds them good. Oats and
clover hay, a little bran and shorts, a run in the pasture every fine
day all winter, will usually keep the colt growing and healthy. A warm
stable with plenty of dry bedding, preferably in a stall with another
colt, is necessary at night.
Colts need a plentiful supply of cool, clean water in summer, but in
winter, water should be heated just enough to take off the chill. It is
bad for a colt to drink at meal-time. (That sounds like a rule for boys
and girls.) A chunk of rock salt handy for colts to lick at helps keep
the appetite normal.
An ordinary farm colt at three or four months old is worth only thirty
or forty dollars. Two years later, with the right kind of care and
teaching, the same colt will bring four times that price. What other
farm crop will do as much?
The mother of a baby colt once died on our farm. My father felt very
badly over it; losing the old mare was misfortune enough, but the colt
was a noble-looking little fellow, highly bred. We girls had been
foster-mothers to almost everything; cats, pups, and pigs were easy,
and calves. But what of a colt? "Let's try if we can't raise him on the
bottle," said our mother. The experiments we tried with that colt were
many. We gave him "half and half" at first--a cup full of milk to one
of water. Our small cousin had once been fed on mare's milk, much to
our disgust, but it gave us ideas for our colt. Mother read somewhere
that cow's milk was not so sweet, but was richer than mare's milk. So
we patched our bits of hearsay together and made up our colt's ration
about like this:
First week: half sweet milk, half water, a teaspoonful of sugar to each
pint, ten times a day--always warm--last feeding at ten P. M.--not
very much at a time. Second and third weeks less water, six feedings a
day, warm and sweet as before. Fourth to tenth week: increase quantity
gradually, give warm--not very rich--milk three times a day. We gave
him a bottle at first with a nipple made of a goose-quill wrapped each
time with clean, soft rags. Everything about his food had to be kept
sweet. We scalded the bottle and the quill and washed them in water and
baking soda, just as mother said. Then we taught him to drink from a
pail. He followed us about like a dog and was very playful and frisky.
We fed him a little hay and oats and grass when he was old enough. My
little sister wanted us to give him less milk so that he would grow up
into a pony, but when he begged for food, she was the first to go for
his bottle. He grew up and developed just like any horse and father
said he was the easiest two-year-old he ever had to teach to work. He
paid us seventy-five dollars for the colt when he was eight months old
and ready to shift for himself with the other colts.
RAISING SHEEP
Every boy on the farm ought to have his own particular hobby in the
line of stock. It is far easier to keep account of your own if they are
entirely different from the animals raised by the other members of the
family. An account should be kept with the animals, to learn whether
they pay or not. It is only by this business-like method that the young
farmer, or the older one for that matter, can know whether his animals
are visitors or boarders.
If the mother keeps poultry, the boys pigs, and the father raises
horses and cows, then why should not the girls raise sheep? There is
room on every fair-sized farm for a flock. There is nothing about the
care of sheep that a strong, healthy girl may not do if she is not
needed to help with housework. Her father will teach and advise her.
Tending sheep is far more healthful occupation and more remunerative
than embroidering sofa pillows or knitting "fancy work."
Whoever undertakes the sheep raising must know first some of the needs
of his favourites. They are grazers. They will glean a good living in
stubble fields and crop grass in pastures where cows would starve; they
will bite the weeds in the fence corners down to the quick nor leave
one stalk to blossom or set seed. They are among the best and cheapest
of lawn-mowers, enriching the ground they feed over. They are easy to
care for, as they can take care of themselves most of the year. What a
joy it is to take a quiet walk over the hills of a Sunday morning to
salt the sheep! They are trustful, playful, docile creatures, and their
presence undeniably adds to the picture of content and comfort that
every homestead should present.
While it is true that sheep will keep fat on good pasture with plenty
of water and a semi-weekly supply of salt, it is not to be supposed
that they can pick up a living the whole year round in a cold climate.
They do not need stuffing in cold weather, but they do need plenty of
good hay in early winter and nourishing food like bran, oats, barley,
and clover hay toward spring. Alfalfa is ideal, but many people
succeed with sheep who fail on alfalfa. Sheep will over-feed if not
restrained. They should have exercise and fresh air in plenty all
winter. They should go out every day to pasture, except during storms,
until snow covers the ground.
Ewes fed but not over-fed over winter and sheltered under some kind
of rain-proof roof will be strong and healthy mothers. A new-born
lamb is about as weak and wobbly and inefficient as a human baby. The
weakest ones seem bent on dying, but a little coddling and care will
put them on their feet. They should be taught how to take nourishment
and whoever takes this in hand should use patience and insist that the
lesson be learned. I have known of many a good shepherd who sat up late
and got up early and visited the sheep at midnight in lambing time and
so saved all his lambs. There is something so appealing about a lamb
that no owner would like to remember that he slept comfortably through
a stormy night while a new-born lamb starved in the presence of plenty
or was chilled past help while its mother could only bleat helplessly
for the slothful shepherd.
Lambs should not follow their mothers to pasture until the grass is
grown enough to be really long and nourishing. They should be out in
the barnyard on warm, sunny days, and not weaned until near six months
old. After August they will fatten on clover pasture and be ready for
market before Christmas.
Sheep are sheared in spring, about April first, but this depends on
the climate. Most farm crops are fall or winter affairs. Like maple
sirup, wool is a spring cash crop, which is a great convenience. An
eight-pound fleece is worth nearly half as much as the sheep it grew
on, and the lambs will soon be worth as much as their mothers. So we
have a double chance to make good in sheep raising.
Sheep are so hardy, so harmless, and so easily managed that the only
wonder is that any farm is without a flock. Men who know say that the
farm dog is to blame for this. How about the farm dog, boys and girls?
Honestly, now, is your dog worth his keep? No matter how much better
he is than the neighbours' dog. How about your dog? You like him, of
course, but is he a loafing, worthless, sneaking, sheep-killing dog?
Look between his teeth before you deny that he is a sheep-killer.
Are you a good citizen if you let such a dog run at large? If you
raise sheep you will need a dog, and remember that a good collie will
protect your sheep from all the roving, bloodthirsty dogs in the
neighbourhood.
[Illustration: Photograph by Julian A. Dimock. "Big Boy Blue" Looks
After the Sheep]
RAISING GOATS
Boys, are you really serious about making some money? Do you live on
a farm where the hills are too steep to plow and the only crop that
amounts to anything is the crop of stones? Are those steep hills
covered with brush and good-for-nothing trees that look too hopeless?
Don't grind your teeth and say "There's no chance here. I'm going to
buy a ticket for the city." Glance at the heading on this page and
don't smile derisively nor turn on to some new chapter.
"Goats! Humph!"
If you never heard of anybody making anything out of goats, here's your
chance to hear something new. People can and do make money out of goats
and so can you. Why, it is too easy!
Here, read these facts about goats:
Goats _prefer_ rough, rocky, wild, and hilly land.
Goats _always thrive_ if allowed considerable range.
Hilly, _bushy_ land is _best_ for goats.
The feed of _one_ cow will keep _twelve_ goats.
_Temperature_ need not be considered. Goats thrive where temperatures
are _extreme_.
The Angora goat _fleece_ is cut annually and is _very valuable_. We
import over one million pounds a year. Skins of common goats are in
_great demand_ for leather. We imported sixteen million dollars' worth
in 1898 and more every year since.
_Goat manure_ is as valuable as that of sheep.
Angora _venison_ cannot be told from lamb.
Goats _scorn_ to eat fresh grass if _coarse weeds_ like wild carrot,
mullein, dock, etc., are in sight.
_Every part_ of a goat is _salable_. Fleece, milk, cheese, skin, flesh,
tallow, bones, hoofs, horns, and manure.
Goats _improve land_. They are "lifelong scavengers," and can put land
covered with useless underbrush into shape for pasture more cheaply and
more quickly than dynamite.
A herd of _common goats_ can be built up in _a few years_. They breed
at one year and usually have twins.
Goats are _hardy_; less subject to disease than sheep.
A good goat is a _money-maker_.
These statements are quoted directly from the writings of men and women
of experience. They have no goats to sell, so you can take their word.
The requirements for successful goat raising are few and easy to
provide. They are these:
(1) _Space._--Goats do not take kindly to herding nor to small fields.
If they have only a small enclosure they are likely spend more time
trying to get at what is outside than in browsing. To meet a wire fence
every few steps makes a goat restive.
(2) _Housing._--Goats must be kept dry overhead and under foot. The
shelter for goats should be high and dry. They will not thrive in wet,
marshy land, nor keep well if their shed is muddy. They dislike filth
and will not stand in it nor touch soiled food. They prefer to sleep
on the roof of the barn, you know, but if a clean, dry bed in an airy
place is provided they will not roost so high.
(3) _Water._--Plenty of clean fresh water should always be available.
If you can supply these three essentials, you are ready to raise goats.
There are two well-marked lines of business in goat raising. Which
shall you follow?
Angoras are raised for their fleece; common goats either for leather or
for milk. Angoras are not much good for milk and their skins are not
so fine nor durable as those of common goats. The Angora is free from
the offensive odour of common male goats. The greatest demand for goat
products in our markets to-day is for Angora fleece and for common goat
skins. The other products, like flesh, hoof, bones and horns, tallow,
cheese, milk, and manure, can easily be marketed and should pay most of
the expenses. The main products should be clear profit.
BUILDING UP A HERD
There is a slow way and a quick way to build up a herd of goats. As
usual the slow way requires less capital. If you have but a few dollars
you will have to begin with cheap goats, but to keep a poor goat is
poor business. You can buy good, common goats for one dollar and a
half or two dollars each and with time and patience build up from them
a herd of Angoras by crossing. If capital is easier to command than
years of time, you will begin with good Angora does which cost from
eight dollars upward. If you begin with common ones, choose white,
short-haired individuals. Keep only the best does in your herd for
breeders; you will soon learn how to judge them by the quality of their
fleece and the price it brings you per pound. In five or six years it
is possible to build up a herd of fine mohair producers from common
goats.
The hair grows coarser as the goat passes six years of age, so it does
not pay to keep one too long. Buy young does. A goat's teeth tell its
age up to the fourth year. If all the eight teeth are full-sized the
goat is certainly four to five years old, it may be more.
CARE OF KIDS
A young kid is not a very sturdy youngster. Good care should be given
both doe and kid at this time. A warm shelter should be provided. May
is the best month for kids to come, in the North. Extra feeding should
be given the doe and plenty of water. If possible each doe with her kid
should have a separate stall or pen so that the doe will know her own
young one. If you can arrange that each pen in the kid stable can have
an outdoor entrance the mother can come and go at will. A board a foot
to eighteen inches high across this entrance will keep the kid from
following his mother. When about six weeks old the kid will jump this
board. By this token you will know that he is strong enough to jump
about over the stones wherever his mother leads him.
FOOD OF GOATS
The comic papers may be right about some things, but they are wrong
about goats. A diet of newspapers and tin cans will not keep a
goat healthy nor produce a salable fleece of fine mohair. Angoras
like common goats are browsers, not grazers like sheep. They eat
coarse vegetation such as weedy growths and the twigs and leaves of
underbrush, rather than grass. Besides this, particularly in winter,
they should have other food. Leaves, table scraps like potato and fruit
parings, turnips and other roots, and cabbage are all acceptable if
clean. Parings and roots should be washed; if you expect goats to eat
swill you deserve to be disappointed. Dirty carrots, rotten apples,
sour or mouldy refuse do not tempt a self-respecting pig; much less
an Angora. Oats in the sheaf are very good fodder for them. Grain is
not required if clover hay, alfalfa, or cowpea stubble is plentiful.
Too much grain makes a lazy goat and a lazy goat will not produce a
handsome fleece. Bran may be fed for a change, and a little cotton seed
or corn may be given, but sparingly. Leaves or other coarse food should
be given plentifully at night, as Angoras relish a midnight lunch
beside their three square meals a day.
A supply of rock salt should be kept where goats can get it whenever
they want it. If it is given only at long intervals they may
over-indulge. Water should be warmed slightly in winter if practicable.
SHELTER AND ENCLOSURE
Hardy as they are, goats cannot stand exposure to storms. They abhor
wet. Cold rain or sleet storms are really dangerous to their health.
Goats will go the long way round every time rather than get into mud.
Mud is very bad for the fleece, too. Buyers refuse to pay for dirt.
Goat shelters should be dry, but they need not be tight except
overhead. In fact many goats die of suffocation when huddled in close
quarters. If the roof is just high enough from the floor for goats to
go under, it can be open all round except perhaps on the side where the
prevailing wind and storms would beat in.
No other animals should be quartered with goats. Experience shows this.
Goats prefer hard beds. Chaff or straw enough to absorb the liquid
manure is all that should be put on the floor. Trees are the best shade
from the hot sun, but if none are growing in the goats' pasture other
shelter should be provided.
It is true that goats thrive best when unconfined. But this does not
mean that your goats should be allowed to range on other people's
domains. They are a very real nuisance in orchards and gardens, and
if your place is small it is no place for goats. A fence need not be
very high to restrain a flock of goats. They are climbers and once
in a while there is one who would take a prize for the "high jump."
Ordinarily a fence three and a half feet high is all that is necessary.
Boards, rails, or wire will make a good goat fence. It should go close
to the ground to prevent crawling under. If wire is used, take care
that the mesh is too small for a goat's head.
You must take your market's demands into consideration when deciding
whether to breed Angoras or common goats. An Angora fleece weighs from
four to eight pounds. This can be cut every year for ten or twelve
years. The common goat's skin is valuable, but he has only one! This
makes the Angora look like the best business proposition, although
requiring more capital to start, as the care required is about the same
and the value of by-products practically equal.
THE COMMON GOAT
Two arguments may be brought forward in favour of the common goat. In
the first place, the herd increases much faster as the Angora doe
usually has only one kid, while twins are the rule with common goats.
There is a decidedly growing demand for goats' milk near large cities,
especially for hospitals. We all know how commonly goats' milk is
used in foreign countries. We Americans have a rather silly prejudice
against it, but we will get over this when we realize how often goats'
milk saves the lives of babies and invalids. The following statements
are vouched for by physicians and others of experience:
[Illustration: Photograph by Helen W. Cooke. Feeding the Goats]
Goats' milk is more easily digested than cows' milk.
Analysis shows goats' milk has a marked similarity to human mothers'
milk and is more readily assimilated by infants.
Goats' milk is generally claimed to be free at all times from germs of
tuberculosis.
Cannot be told from cow's milk by taste.
Excellent for coffee and in cooking.
The goat is claimed by its friends to be greatly the superior of the
cow for milk, for the following reasons:
The goat is naturally cleanly.
The goat is easy to keep clean because of her small size. Goats can be
and are put into tubs and scrubbed and sterilized when being used as
foster-mothers in baby hospitals. But no such treatment is possible
with a cow.
A goat can easily be taken from place to place with a family. A cow
could not be transported without great expense.
Goats eat far less than cows. Eight milch goats can be kept on the food
of one milch cow. The same quality of food should be furnished.
I believe there is a great future in America for the milch goat.
TWENTY ACRES REDEEMED: THE STORY OF A SATISFACTORY EXPERIMENT WITH
GOATS IN NEW ENGLAND
In January, 1902, I bought seventy-five Angoras, as I had about twenty
acres of brush land that I wanted to reclaim. I kept the goats in sheds
until May. I had to put up a wire fence to keep them from visiting my
neighbours, and in early May turned them into the first section, about
one half of the piece. I built a shed for them to stay in nights and
during rains.
The work they did was marvellous. In less than a month this section had
the appearance of having been struck by a cyclone, and it was evident
that the goats would soon require more territory. Consequently I wired
the other section of this twenty-acre piece, and when finished allowed
them the range of the other piece, to which they marched in military
precision daily, returning to the shed at night or during the approach
of rain, which they seemed to foretell as accurately as a barometer.
It was not long before it developed that they would require fresher
fields or I must reduce my flock, as this ground was all that I had of
that kind. Consequently I sold all but twenty-five, retaining twelve
registered does, twelve kids, and one buck. For the does I paid ten
dollars each, and my buck, which was a kid, cost twenty-five dollars.
I had some grades that I sold at eight dollars and eight dollars and
twenty-five cents each, and also some wether kids that I sold at five
dollars each. I have this same flock now, with the addition of ten kids
born this spring from these twelve does, which had twelve kids, two
having died, leaving thirty-five now in the field.
During the past winter I have handled more than six hundred that were
sent here from the West. The test that I was anxiously watching for
at the advent of spring was to see the effect of their work done last
season, and I must say I am very agreeably surprised. In the first lot
fenced there is scarcely a brush left, no briers, and not even Canada
thistles. The entire field between the rocks came out this spring with
beautiful, thick, green, grassy foliage, mostly white clover. On the
other lot, part of the brush tried hard to show its tenacity of life
by coming out with green leaves, but at this writing the shrubs have
fallen prey to the devouring Angora, and green grass is coming out
in about all the ground that they have trod. This alone to me is a
satisfactory commercial experience.
W. O. CORNING
RAISING CALVES
Feeding the calves is always the boy's job or the girl's. Usually
the milk is prepared by their mother, but the responsibility for the
calves' welfare is left to the youngsters. If you look upon calf
feeding as nothing but a chore to get over with as soon as possible,
you get very little fun out of it. But if you see in those calves the
beginning of your own fortune or the foundation of your college fund
they look different. Whether the calves are yours or your father's,
they are living creatures, capable of appreciating proper care and
repaying it. They are just as capable of showing neglect.
If you are going to feed the calves, make a study of calf nature,
know what kind of animals you want to make of them, find out how to
accomplish your purpose, and then keep a straight course. Find out
first the parentage of the calf. Then inquire if it is to be a beef
animal or a dairy cow. Knowing its past and its future you can provide
wisely for the present.
A new-born calf should stay with the mother from twelve to twenty-four
hours. The fluid she gives first is not milk, but is just what the calf
needs to prepare its digestive organs for milk. If left longer with the
mother it will be more bother to train. The calf should be fed sweet,
whole milk for two weeks. If put immediately onto a diet of skim-milk,
indigestion is likely to result, and the calf gets a setback from which
it may never recover.
When a young calf is taken from its mother, it knows nothing about
drinking. The best practice is to let it fast for from twelve to
twenty-four hours till it gets good and hungry. It is then in a state
of mind to learn anything rather than go without any longer. [They
treat human babies the same way if need be.] If started right, a young
calf learns to drink in a day or two. Holding the pail with one to two
quarts of warm, fresh, whole milk in your left hand, stand beside the
calf and put your right hand over its nose. Insert two fingers into
its mouth. Did you ever feel anything so funny? The calf will suck
your fingers hungrily. Gently push its nose down into the warm milk
with your fingers still in its mouth. After a while gently pull out
one finger. If he misses it put it back and later try again. In a few
lessons the calf will drink readily. Patience and kindness must be
exercised if one little scamp proves dull. A calf that gets a slap for
not drinking will come to think that the two disagreeable things always
come together and his education and his growth will be delayed.
For the first ten to twelve days the calf should have about five quarts
of milk a day, divided into three feedings. This should be warmed to
blood heat, ninety-five to a hundred degrees Fahr. At two weeks you
can begin to substitute skim-milk. A half-pint a day at first is about
right. Watch the effect on the calf. Increase the quantity gradually,
until at a month or six weeks old the calf is getting seven to eight
quarts per day of skim-milk, always warm and perfectly sweet.
The worst disease of calf-hood is scours, and this disease is caused by
feeding cold, unclean, or sour milk. I'd be ashamed to have a calf of
mine sick with the scours! To cure it, add lime-water to the milk or
mix a teaspoonful of dried blood in a small amount of water, then stir
into the milk. Or an ounce of wheat bran or kaffir corn meal stirred
into the milk will be helpful. Some recommend oat or corn meal fed dry,
or a little linseed meal mixed in a little water and then stirred into
the milk.
If your calves are all heifers to be added to the dairy herd, you do
not want them to lay on great amounts of fat, but to grow strong and be
able to digest great amounts of hay. If they are to be beef, they need
more fat. Grain is fattening, especially corn. Begin to feed hay as
soon as the calf will take it. Clean, dry clover is best, but any good
hay will help prepare their stomachs for the work which is expected of
them later. Milk and hay are best for growing calves. Grain, oil-meal,
and pasture furnish variety.
Have you seen a wild-eyed cow being literally dragged behind a wagon,
scared past endurance and behaving like a savage creature? There is not
the slightest excuse for that sort of thing. What fun it is to slip a
halter on a calf to-day and let him get accustomed to it; to-morrow
lead him about a little with coaxing. In a few days he will lead like
an old horse. He will learn to expect only kindness from his feeder
and trainer. It would be well to accustom the calves to the presence
of your dog, too. There are men who think a frightened animal is a
humourous sight. But such a man is "no gentleman" and I certainly would
never think of trusting him to drive my horses, or milk my cows, or
even feed my pigs.
Our calves were kept in an old orchard, convenient to the house, with
good pasture, plenty of sun and shade, and a suitable fence. A shed for
wet weather is essential, for a clean, dry bed must be provided. Calves
have no way of cleaning themselves, therefore they must not be allowed
to get dirty.
Milk should be fed until the calves are four months old, and may be
continued longer. After the first few weeks, when they have begun to
take some hay and grass, the milk may be given in two feedings. Water
should be given freely especially in hot weather. If your pasture has
a clear running brook, your calves are in luck and so are you, for
carrying water for a bunch of calves is no joke. A garden hose or a
series of v-shaped troughs from pump to pen saves a lot of time and
backache.
A calf whose mother has a record for milk rich in butter fat and a sire
of good family has in it the possibilities of a prize-winner. Whether
she will earn seventy-seven cents a year over and above her keep, like
those one thousand and twenty poor cows that Illinois boys and girls
know about, or thirty dollars a year, like the twenty-five good cows,
depends very much on the care she gets. No amount of care given to a
cow will make up for neglect to the calf. There's a big responsibility
on the boys and girls of the farms, for calf feeding is their job.
THE STORY OF TWO BOYS AND A COW
The suggestion that the suburban home might be a money-making
investment would strike the average suburbanite as ridiculous. But a
few moments of careful calculation may put preconceived notions to
flight and show how considerable money may be made--or saved, which is
quite as important.
Some years ago a family, which included two boys of eleven and thirteen
years, took a house in the outskirts of a good-sized town, about thirty
minutes' ride from the city. The father was a buyer for an importing
house, and absent from home for several months of each year. His salary
was large, as such salaries go, but there were seven children to be
raised and educated, several of them with marked abilities that needed
the very best possible instruction to bring them to their highest
development.
The boys spent one summer vacation at the country house of an old
friend of the family and got ideas. They talked them over, went back to
their friend for counsel, then turned their batteries on their parents
to gain their consent to an important new enterprise.
Attached to the house was about an acre of ground, three fourths of
which was old pasture grown to weeds and a tangle of brier bushes.
By promising to work for a farmer during the coming vacation the
boys arranged to have the field, which they cleared and made ready,
ploughed, harrowed, and marked in the most thorough fashion.
They planted it with the best variety of mid-season sweet corn. The
farmer cultivated it, and the boys hoed it and kept it in almost
perfect condition.
The season was very dry, but they laid a hose so as to start a stream
of water into the lines between the rows of corn; then with a good pump
they filled the trenches they had dug and completely irrigated the
entire field.
The crop was a great success. The boys picked and sold at retail prices
to private customers twelve hundred dozen ears of the finest corn
raised in that section. As it averaged twenty cents a dozen, it footed
up the very comfortable sum of two hundred and forty dollars with small
ears and left-overs quite sufficient for the use of the family.
Two weeks from the first picking the stalks were cut and set up to cure
for the cow that was really the object of their endeavour.
The friend of the family selected the cow. She was a fine, fresh, young
Jersey and Alderney cross--a high-grade animal, good for quality as
well as quantity of milk and cream.
There was small, well-built barn on the place, and here the cow was
stabled. Cleanliness was the first, last, and intermediate law in and
about the place. The boys had clothes expressly for barn wear and white
aprons with long sleeves to put on when milking.
Such unusual attention to details attracted customers until the demand
went far ahead of the supply.
For the first six months the cow gave, on an average, sixteen quarts a
day, fourteen of which were sold to persons who came for it, thereby
saving all trouble and cost of delivery. Two quarts were kept for the
family.
For the next four months the sales were twelve quarts a day. Feed for
the cow cost one dollar a week, besides hay and corn-stalks.
The cow was bought late in July, and by the first of August the milk
trade was well established. After ten months' experience the boys made
up a statement to show to their father when he returned from a trip to
Europe.
CREDIT
1,200 doz. corn at 20 cts. a doz. $240.00
Stalks 20.00
Milk, 184 days, 14 qts. at 8 cts. a qt. 206.08
" 120 " 12 " " " " " 115.20
--------
$581.28
DEBIT
1 cow, $60.00; 1 ton hay, $18.00; feed, $40.00 $118.00
--------
Profit, cash on hand $463.28
Value of 1 cow 60.00
--------
Total assets $523.28
NELSON S. STONE
RAISING PIGS
When I was nine years old I laid the foundation of my college fund. My
grandmother had a flock of twenty or thirty geese which were kept for
the pillows and feather beds they filled. Great was my delight when
grandma told me that she would give me a pig if I would help her pick
the geese. Helping her would have been reward enough, for I was a great
grandma girl, but the ambition of my childhood was to own a pig. Did
not my elder brother now own a beautiful mare and colt, and had he not
started with a pig?
Wednesday was the day set for plucking the geese and all my leisure on
Monday and Tuesday was spent in building a pen. Plenty of material from
which to construct this edifice was found about the place. I wisely
located it at the back of the henhouse which left me only three sides
to build. One corner was roofed with the best boards I could find, for
I didn't wish my precious pig to suffer from sunstroke or have his bed
transformed into a mud-hole when it rained.
When the geese were picked to the last feather they could spare, I
went with grandmother to select my pig from the litter of sucklings
now ready to begin taking their food from the trough. She generously
allowed me my choice, and if I did not get the pick of the bunch it was
not her fault. I wonder how a girl of nine succeeded in transporting
a lusty pig the three quarters of a mile between grandmother's house
and ours. I should not like to undertake it now, but my confidence in
my ability to do what I wanted done in those days was unlimited. A
piece of rope, a stout cudgel, a pair of strong, young arms, and a high
disregard of appearances sustained me. I got my treasure home and into
his pen--no mean triumph even as viewed by my elder brother who had
passed by the pig stage and even the calf stage and entered into the
exalted realm of horse ownership.
My father was not the "your shoat, my hog" kind of a father. There came
a time when he used to say that the girls owned all the cattle and the
boys all the horses on the farm. When my pig grew up, I traded it to my
father for a fine calf. This calf was the nucleus of my "herd," for I
never owned a horse. All through my college course when I needed money,
I used to write to father to sell "Rowena" or "Corinne" or "Natty
Bumpo." (We named our calves after the people we read about.) There
was always a buyer ready at hand and the price paid was strictly in
accord with the market quotations. The cow which bought my graduation
cap and gown was the last of her race, "Betsy Bobbett," one of the
great-great-granddaughters of the calf for which I traded that original
pig.
No one can deny or doubt that there is profit in pig raising. Pork
"on the hoof" is ten cents a pound even as I write these words, with
prospects good for going higher. A profit of one hundred per cent. is
recorded by growers when the price is only six cents a pound.
With the one exception of poultry, hogs bring the quickest returns for
investment of any live stock. It is poor economy to keep any animal
which cannot pay its board, except for sentiment, and few people keep
pigs on that account. If I were beginning again I should not trade my
pig for a calf but should raise pigs.
In selecting a mother for my family of hogs I should care more about
her individual character than about her breed. A good brood sow
ought to have a good disposition, which means a good digestion, and
respond quickly to kindness. Nervous, irritable sows often develop
vicious habits. A short, broad face, a wide space between the eyes,
a deep chest, broad back, and large hams with rather short legs are
all considered good points. A good-natured, healthy pig has a bright,
friendly manner when accosted and a look of shrewd though guileless
interest in his master.
"Dirty as a pig" is a slander on the pig and a censure on its owner.
Pigs and goats are more particular about their beds than either horses
or cows. Success with porkers is spelt _c-l-e-a-n-l-i-n-e-s-s_. They
like to wallow in the edge of a sluggish stream on a warm day. Well,
so do you. Mud is not dirty unless mixed with foul manure and decaying
vegetable matter.
All feeding troughs, floors, and beds should be thoroughly scraped,
swept, and dried if the pigs are to be healthy, happy, and comfortable.
Under no other conditions does keeping pigs pay.
You will be very fortunate if your young sow's first litter numbers
ten or a dozen lively youngsters. Six or eight will not be bad if she
raises them all, and with care she ought to. Improper care and feeding
before the pigs come are usually responsible for any cannibalistic
habits developed by the sow. Corn alone is not a good ration except
for fattening. Used with wheat, middlings, bran, and ground oats, with
plenty of clover or alfalfa hay, corn is all right. The sow should be
put into a pen by herself before farrowing time. The best bedding is
clean wheat or rye straw, which should not be left until it is wet and
filthy. Sprinkle air-slaked lime in the sleeping pen under the fresh
bedding. A sick pig means a neglectful owner.
Pigs ought to grow fast and without any check. At six months old they
should weigh two hundred pounds, an average gain you see, of over a
pound a day. With a good, healthy mother little pigs need no extra
feeding the first month. The sow should be given nourishing food, bran
and ground oats and rye, lots of skim-milk and an abundance of clean,
fresh water.
If the pigs seem hungry when only a couple of weeks old a little, new
trough should be made for them. A small quantity of boiled corn and
skim-milk should be put into this trough where the little fellows can
get to it but the sow cannot. They may not take much at first, but
several hours later the trough should be rinsed and a fresh supply
given. Sour, dirty milk may produce serious sickness in young pigs and
check growth. The sow will wean them when she gets ready, and they will
not know the difference if they get used to their trough early.
It is possible to raise and fatten pigs in pens, but it is not
economical. Pasture is essential to their best growth. It gives them
exercise, and the green food not only nourishes them, but aids in
the digestion of the more concentrated foods. The expression, "Pigs
in clover," is based on fact. A happy, healthy, money-maker is the
pasture-fed pig. He will put on his ten cents' worth a day of bone,
muscle and fat at less expense in a clover patch than elsewhere.
Alfalfa or cow peas will serve him about as well. Fruit windfalls are
good for him, too.
If you live on a place where grain or fruit are the main crops and a
few cows are kept, you are losing a great opportunity if you are not
raising a few pigs. They dispose of the surplus on such farms, as well
as the unsalable garden crops and weeds, and pay their board day by day.
The owner should keep a close account with his pigs. If they eat what
would otherwise be wasted you are so much to the good. What you sell
them for, less what you have paid out for food, equals what you get for
your time.
RAISING CHICKENS
Success with chickens does not depend upon the breed, nor upon any
patent devices for hatching and brooding, nor on any special mixture
of feed. You can find frenzied advertisers trying to disprove these
statements, but do not your own observations bear me out? However, I
venture to say that with common-sense and gumption, and a real liking
for chickens, success in this line is nearly certain. There are dozens
of good stories of boys who have begun chicken raising at twelve
to fourteen years of age and have made money at it, beside training
themselves at the same time in business methods and efficiency. There
are no good reasons why girls also should not succeed.
There are certain principles of poultry culture upon which most people
agree. These are based on a knowledge of hen nature and are the result
of study and experience. We will discuss them under the following heads:
1, Housing and Care; 2, Food and Feeding; 3, Raising Young Stock; 4,
Business Methods.
HOUSING
[Illustration: Frame for eleven-dollar chicken house]
This first department properly includes not only the house proper with
all its interior fixtures and its care, but the runs, the scratching
shed, and all that has to do with the supply of air, warmth and
sunshine and the protection of the flock from disease and vermin. No
matter how plain and ordinary your chicken house is, the test of your
fitness for the business comes with its care, not once a month, but
day by day.
[Illustration: Chicken house a boy can build]
Many people have an idea that the only way to keep hens healthy and
productive is to let them range. Of course it is true that chickens
on the farm seem to pick up a free living, but it is equally true
that, as a general thing, the farmer does not keep any account with
his chickens, and if they get into the corn crib or granary he does
not know how much grain they eat and how much they waste. If they hide
their nests and the eggs spoil, or if they sit and the chicks do not
live to get to the barnyard, the owner is unaware of his loss. If,
having no house and nest boxes, the hens lay in the weeds, in the wood
pile, in the straw stack, in the haymow, it's no loss, for the women
and children hunt the eggs and their time isn't worth anything! But
do you believe there are any farm hens whose portraits will appear
in the big magazines? Did you see that one last year in _Collier's
Weekly_? Do you suppose there are many 200-eggers on farms with all
their supposed advantages? I don't. But we shall never know, because no
accurate records can be kept of chickens that run at large.
I shall take it for granted that you expect to begin in a small way
with very little to invest. Remember that a few hens pay better per
hen than a large number, but on the other hand it takes about as much
time to care for a dozen as it does for one hundred. You will therefore
look forward with satisfaction to increasing your flock as your capital
grows and your time becomes more valuable.
Have you a suitable place for chickens? It should be dry, sunny,
though with some shade, protected from severe winds and storms. The
sun is the greatest purifier and disinfector in the universe, and you
must have your house face the south or east if possible. Whether your
first house is made of store boxes or of expensive matched lumber the
principles are the same. To make the house _dry_ it should be built on
well-drained soil and should sit up six inches from the surface of the
ground so that air can circulate freely beneath.
The only heat in the hen house comes from the hens and the sunshine.
Therefore, to make the house _warm_ you should have it small enough
so that your hens can generate heat enough to keep warm in winter.
The exposure should be such that the sun can get into it. If possible
it should be shaded by trees or other buildings against storms and
summer sun. Every hen needs from four to five square feet of floor
space and only eight to ten cubic feet of air space. Square houses are
more economical to build. Figure out with diagrams and drawings to
scale just how large a building is needed to house your flock when you
get it. How low at the back can you make it without bumping your head
when you go inside? How high in front must it be to provide space for
your door and window? What shaped roof will be easiest to build, most
economical of lumber, and most satisfactory as a rain shed?
[Illustration: Self-feed grit box]
Consider many things in the selection of material. Rough boards are a
little cheaper, but how they do ruin good paint and whitewash brushes!
Matched boards are cheaper and tighter than unmatched boards with
strips nailed over the cracks. For the roof some kind of waterproof
roofing material will keep the house warm and dry. If you have ever
seen a chicken house with a cement floor you will be determined to have
that kind. At first the expense may be greater than for boards, but if
you live in your own home you can afford to put a cement floor in the
chicken house sooner or later, especially if you do the work yourself.
If you are a renter you will not feel like putting in expensive,
permanent improvements. It will be warm and dry, saving many losses
from wet feet and diseases brought on by dampness and cold. It is easy
to clean. It will do away with the rat problem, and last forever. You
can put it in after the house is built. Figure out the cost of a layer
of cement one and one half inches thick laid on a bed of gravel and
small stones. The cement is mixed as follows: one part Portland cement,
three parts clean sand, five parts gravel. Mix the cement pretty thick,
tamp it down conscientiously until perfectly level, then with a trowel
smooth it and smooth it, over and over, until the surface is free from
anything like a stone or large pebble.
The door to the chicken house should be well hung, easy to open, shut,
and lock. The window is to admit light and sunshine, especially the
latter. Very small panes may be cheap but they shut out the sun; twelve
eight by ten panes in a single sash make a window of convenient size.
The window should be placed so that the sun can get way back to the
very farthest corner of the house. A high window is better for this
than a low one. The diagram shows why.
[Illustration: The windows should be placed high enough to let the sun
in to the back of the house]
Sunshine and exercise are necessary for healthy fowls. They can stand
cold weather well, if they are kept dry and active. Scratching sheds or
open-front pens provide sunshine and exercise.
Scratching for food in the litter keeps hens moving and they get to
be very athletic, jumping up to cabbages and fresh meat or grain
self-feeders hung just out of reach. Scratching sheds in the North need
adjustable curtains of coarse muslin to keep out driving rain, snow,
and sleet. The State Agricultural Experiment Station at Orono, Maine,
has made valuable studies of curtained sheds, and the use of this form
of poultry house has found favour all over the country.
[Illustration: Grain self-feeder for fowls]
The furniture of the hen house consists of roosts, dropping board,
nests, dust box, and utensils to hold ground feed, grit, shell, and
water. In making and erecting each piece ask yourself, "Will this be
easy to clean?" The roosts should be in the corner farthest from door
and window, out of all draughts. There should be enough of them to
provide each fowl with six to eight inches of room and they should be
set at least a foot apart. Do not have the roosts at different levels.
It is hen nature to want the highest place, and they will fight and
crowd and worry each other if there is a higher roost. Pieces of two by
two, with the upper edge rounded, make good perches.
As the floor of the chicken house is also the dining table for the
occupants it is extremely important that there should be a well-built
platform under the roosts for droppings, in order to keep the floor
clean. There should be space enough between this board and the perches
to allow you to clean it frequently without difficulty.
[Illustration: Corner in chicken house, showing up-to-date furniture]
If you ever tried to clean a range of wall nests you know why the
up-to-date poultry men are discarding them as unsanitary. Many are
now placing their nests under the dropping board. They are out of
the way here, not too high for the hens, nor too low for you. Square
nests, fourteen inches each way and at least a foot from the droppings
platform, are satisfactory. A long door hinged at the top and hooked
at the bottom should form the back of a row of nests. You open this to
gather eggs and to clean the nests. The front, where the hens enter,
should be in behind under the platform. As it is rather dark in there,
the hens are pleased, because they like to preserve the old-time
fiction that they are hiding their nests away. The nest should be five
or six inches deep. Straw is the best nesting material. Short hay is
next best. A hen cannot be happy with excelsior twisted round her toes
and an unhappy hen is an unproductive hen.
The dust bath must be provided. Most baths are wet but hens are dry
cleaners. The dust bath must be dry to be of any use; the lighter,
finer, and dryer the better. A sunny corner of the house or shed is the
best place. Sifted coal ashes and street dust is a good mixture.
Allow just as much space for the runs as you can afford to fence. If
possible divide the enclosure in two and keep one part seeded to clover
while the chickens are in the other. The heavier fowls usually make
very little trouble flying over a fence of five foot wire netting even
though it have no top strip. Clipping one wing may be necessary to
restrain some individuals. Small trees in the runs are most desirable.
Plant there such small fruit trees as plum or cherry and the hens will
help to keep insects in check.
[Illustration: Covered dust bath in sunny corner]
One of the biggest items of work in the chicken business is keeping
the house clean. The health, comfort, happiness, and the very life of
the hens, as well as the business, depend on this. Many a boy with a
sort of natural knack at carpentry can build a chicken house out of
second-hand lumber or out of a couple of piano boxes. But it takes a
long distance form of gumption to keep any chicken house sanitary.
The droppings should be cleaned up often and right here a word to the
wise. Hen manure is a valuable garden fertilizer _if_ it is sprinkled
with land plaster while fresh. Otherwise it may become very nearly
worthless. So if you have a garden or can dispose of your fertilizer
every day or two you can make something extra on this by-product by a
semi-weekly cleaning of roosts and droppings board. Litter is not dirt
in the chicken house but it ought to be dry, fresh litter.
It is not enough that the house should look clean. The obvious dirt,
bad as it is, does less harm than the almost invisible vermin that
lurk in the crevices of roosts, nests, and walls. Whitewash is a very
wholesome finish for the interior and should be put on at least twice a
year. This is not enough however. Every square inch of surface should
be wet thoroughly with some liquid which is sure death to vermin. Spray
or brush may be used. I wonder if this could be done too often in hot
weather. Once a month is probably often enough if good insect powder
is used on the hens and in the nests. In winter the vermin are less
active, but it is not safe to neglect them even then.
FOOD AND FEEDING
Hens are known to be omnivorous. They must have animal and mineral as
well as vegetable food. They need these things in variable quantities
depending on their occupation. The hen's main duties are growing,
laying, brooding, moulting, fattening. She needs a great variety of
these three classes of foods throughout her life. Study your flock,
read of the experiences of others in magazines, bulletins, and books,
follow their advice, and work out mixtures and methods to suit your
conditions after you gain experience. The hens will give you many a
hint. Let them out of the pen now and then just before feeding time
and see how they make for the grass. In the evening the earthworms are
near the surface. The hens devour them greedily. You can get the flock
back easily if you have a call, whistle, or other signal which they
associate with grain-scattering, but they will go in at twilight anyhow.
Sitting hens need less food because of their sedentary occupation. The
main thing is to keep food and fresh water where they can get it when
they want it, or see that they go to it regularly.
Broody hens are a trial. The common practices of starving them, ducking
them, and otherwise subjecting them to indignities, are little short
of cruel and often fail to cure their natural desire to sit. Stop and
reason not with, but about, the hen. Having laid all the eggs nature
has provided during the spring, the hen's instinct is to brood and rear
a nestful. She has worked hard and maybe is run down physically. Feel
her bones. What you want from her is more eggs. Instead of wasting time
"getting even" with her for being a nuisance, try some rational way of
breaking up her desire to sit. Remove her immediately from the nest to
a coop. Instead of starving her give her a plentiful supply of the diet
you have found best for layers. She will probably soon begin to lay
again if treated sensibly.
[Illustration: Racks over feed pans prevent waste and soiling food]
Moulting is a perfectly natural process but it occurs at the end of
the season and the chickens are often in a low state of vitality.
For this reason it is a critical time. Study the hens. Find out what
their physical condition is at moulting season. The best condition is
half-way between fat and thin. If they are thin, provide a wholesome
diet rich in fatty foods, as corn, oats, sunflower, and some flaxseed,
with bran, meat scraps, and clover. If heavy with fat from too rich
a diet in the summer, less of the fat-producing foods makes a better
moulting diet.
The quality and flavour of the eggs and meat depend pretty much on the
kind of food given. If filth is taken into the hen's system it affects
her general health and efficiency. There is an opinion that hens and
pigs are by nature dirty. We will not stop to argue that, but your hens
will eat nothing but clean food if nothing else is provided. That's
certain! Look to your feeding racks and watering pans. Use water freely
and a stiff brush or cloth. Clean water is positively necessary. All
sorts of diseases lurk in dirty houses, filthy runs, and stale, unclean
feeding and drinking pans.
Regularity in feeding is important. Do not go into this business if
you expect frequently to be otherwise employed at feeding time. The
main feedings are two, morning and late afternoon, for whole or cracked
grain scattered in the litter. Ground grain should be there, in a
hopper, at all hours in summer and all the afternoon the rest of the
year. The exercise they must take to get the grain keeps the hens from
getting fat and lazy.
A busy hen is a happy hen and a productive hen. Hang a half cabbage up
just out of reach in the house on a stormy day and see them train for
the standing broad jump! If you can get what is known as "the haslet,"
really the lungs, heart, and liver of a porker or lamb, you can suspend
this in the same way and they will work all the better for it.
RAISING YOUNG CHICKENS
[Illustration: Model chicken coop--open on pleasant days]
It is poor practice to set your hens in the chicken house. Prepare
as many fresh nests as you expect to need. Put them in the cellar,
unused shed, under the porch, or any convenient and protected place.
Doors of wire netting or slats are a great convenience. When a hen is
broody, take her off the nest the first night and put her into the
new place with an artificial egg or two. Ten to one she will stay all
right. If not, do not waste time with her. When assured that her mind
is unalterably made up, give her thirteen eggs and close the door on
her again. Set two or three the same day and later combine the flocks
under one hen. Select the eggs with reference to their shape, size, and
quality of shell. Misshapen, very large, or very small eggs or those
with thin shells are worthless for setting. Set the eggs of the best
layers. Every morning take sitters off nests, leave food and water for
them, and return in half an hour. Usually they are all back in their
places in less time than that. If not, you can replace and shut them in
again. In eighteen to twenty-one days the eggs will hatch.
Probably more little chicks die from lice than from any other cause.
Preventive measures must begin early. Get fresh, dry insect powder and
treat the nest and hen about the third, the ninth, and the fifteenth
day of incubation. Rub the powder all through the feathers. Fine dust
obstructs the breathing pores of the lice and kills them. When you
take the chicks from the nest examine the head, neck, and vent regions
of every one. If lice are present a drop of melted lard will put an end
to them. Constant vigilance and nothing short of it, will prevent death
from lice.
[Illustration: Prop the door open, thus, in rain, wind, or too hot sun]
A good home-made lice powder, costing only about four cents a pound,
may be made as follows: Mix together one quarter pint crude carbolic
acid (90 per cent. pure), and three quarters of a pint of gasolene.
Stir into this enough plaster of Paris to take up the liquid, (about
two and one half pounds). Mix thoroughly and rub through a wire
mosquito screen to break the lumps. This can be used to dust through
the feathers, the day after it is made. Keep in a tight jar or box.
This powder is the invention of an expert in poultry husbandry.
The coops for hen and chicks need not be ponderous, but they should be
rain proof. A coop two and one half feet square with removable roof
and floor is not too heavy to handle and answers every purpose. A wire
netting run three or four feet long attached to each coop is necessary
and this combination will house a hen and from fifteen to twenty
chickens.
[Illustration: Closed for the night. Vermin-proof, weather-proof.
Screen-covered ventilator on one side]
[Illustration: Bottom of model coop can be cleaned by lifting up the
coop]
All the food a young chick needs the first twenty-four hours is
provided by nature. After that it is "up to you." Their first meal may
be hard-boiled eggs minced finely, shells and all, and mixed with
oatmeal or custard made of milk and eggs baked hard, or it may be baked
and crumbled corn bread. By the third day they will be ready for raw
broken grain. There are many good commercial kinds: less trouble than
making your own mixtures. The chicks will learn to scratch for this
in a week or two. The hen is their teacher. Fine grit, charcoal, and
clean water must be kept where they can get what they want. Soft food
should not be fed in unlimited quantities; give what they will eat in
five or ten minutes, then take it away. They are likely to over-eat of
wet mashes, but what they have to work for is not likely to give them
indigestion.
When chickens are two months old they no longer need wet mash. They
should now have access to food whenever they want it. A mixture of
cracked corn, wheat, beef scrap, bone, grit, shell, and other grains,
with dry middlings and bran, may be put into a slatted self-feeder,
like the illustration, easily constructed by yourself. It is not much
trouble to see that this is never empty. If fed only at intervals they
rush at you, bolt the biggest grains, stuff their crops, crowd away
weak or modest ones; result, some are under-fed, others are over-fed.
If food is kept where they can get it whenever they happen to think
of it they take a reasonable amount, then visit the growing clover or
grass, pick up a casual pebble, take a drink of water, scratch out a
worm, and return to the feed tray, all in natural course of the day's
work.
You will want to get rid of most of your young cockerels as soon as
they are marketable. Broilers bring highest prices. To put them in
tip-top condition they should be fattened for about two to three weeks
when they are four months old. There is nothing better for fattening
than a mash made of equal parts finely ground corn meal and wheat
middlings with one fourth the quantity of meat meal. This should be wet
with sour skim-milk or buttermilk and fed in a semi-liquid condition,
about the consistency of pancake batter. Ground oats may be added. The
product is known in the highest priced city hotels as "milk fed" or
even "cream fed" chicken. If you can get skim-milk cheap why not buy
a bunch of young cockerels and stuff them for market? They have been
known to put on a pound for every five pounds of this mixture eaten.
BUSINESS METHODS
The day you drive your first nail into what is to be your chicken
house you should start an account. Every item should go down, cost of
materials, cost of stock, cost of feed. Economize where you can by
utilizing vacant space for growing clover for summer feed and some
root crop like mangolds for winter supply. Apples are fine in winter
for hens. You can often get bushels of windfalls for the picking.
Sunflowers are easy to grow and their heads hold a tremendous lot of
chicken feed. Table scraps ground with a hand mill vary the hen's diet,
but do avoid sloppy messes.
There are two sides to every account. If you charge the chickens with
what they cost you, it is only fair to yourself and to them to credit
them with the eggs and meat they furnish, as well as with increase of
stock, etc.
[Illustration: Trap-nest open. The hen's weight shuts the door behind
her]
In every flock there are some idlers. They lay only a hundred or so
eggs, they leave their eggs too long when sitting, or they never put
on any weight. You want to be rid of all such. You can mark the bad
sitters, and send them to the pot, as well as those whose habits are
such as to make them a nuisance. But you need to know which fowls lay
the biggest and best eggs and which lay the largest number. For market
in our country where eggs are sold by the dozen it is numbers that
count, but for breeding you want eggs of good size and shape. You also
want to set the eggs of the good layers. These eggs taste no better
in cake or omelet, but by careful selection you can breed a strain
of extra good layers, right in your hen house. The device known as a
trap-nest is the thing you will need if you go at it scientifically.
You want it in winter, too, to prevent killing your best hens for
potpie, while the idlers cheerfully eat your grain without recompense.
The simpler the mechanism of the trap-nest the better. It must stand
open until the hen enters, then close without frightening her. Most of
them keep the hen a prisoner until you go and examine the nest, credit
the hen by her leg-band number, and release her. By following the
drawings in the bulletins of the New York and Maine Experiment Stations
referred to in the list of bulletins on chickens you can construct your
own trap-nests.
[Illustration: Trap-nest closed after hen has gone in]
There are people who claim that "common chickens" or mixed breeds
are hardier than pure bred fowls and better all around producers.
How many can show records to make good that claim? American boys and
girls who go into chicken raising will want to breed from good pure
stock. Nothing is too good for them. Did you ever hear any one show any
enthusiasm when passing a flock of mongrels? Contrast this with the
delight you and all your friends take in the sight of a hundred fowls
all white, all red, all spangled, all black, all piebald, all blue,
or all speckled, as alike as peas in a pod! I vote for the pure stock
every time. You can keep it pure and strong by exchanging cockerels
with other breeders of the same variety and with similar ideals and
practices.
Keeping chickens isn't mere child's play. There's lots to be done. You
must be carpenter, gardener, breeder, merchant, and even doctor, all
rolled into one. But there is fun in it and profit in it. Better than
all, there is a satisfaction in doing a good job and doing it well, and
it keeps a boy out of doors where he belongs if he's a healthy boy.
EGG RECORDS
HOUSE NO. MATCHED BIRD NO.
PEN NO. VARIETY
+======+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+=====+====+
| DATE |NOV.|DEC.|JAN.|FEB.|MAR.|APR.|MAY |JUNE|JULY|AUG.|SEPT.|OCT.|
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 1 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 2 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 3 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 4 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 5 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 6 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 7 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 8 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 9 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 10 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 11 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 12 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 13 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 14 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 15 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 16 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 17 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 18 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 19 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 20 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 21 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 22 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 23 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 24 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 25 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 26 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 27 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 28 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 29 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 30 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| 31 | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| | | | | | | | | | | | | |
|TOTALS+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-----+----+
| | | | | | | | | | | | | |
+======+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+=====+====+
The egg record is the up-to-date way of keeping tab on idlers. It goes
with the trap-nest.
[Illustration: A useful hen gate]
As with many other products of home industry the first and best market
is the home market. Credit the hens with every pound of meat you
furnish for the table and every egg consumed by the family. But you
will soon need to extend your market. Across the street, up and down
on both sides, you can find people who like "personally conducted"
eggs and prefer that the fowls served on their tables should be
acquaintances rather than the embalmed kind. You must be business man
enough to work up a trade for fresh, clean eggs in attractive packages,
and for wholesome meat. It would be a good stroke of business to date
your eggs if you know what demand you can depend on. That would help
impress the idea of real freshness on the consumer's mind.
If you pluck fowls for market it will interest you to know that
feathers have a market value. They should be plucked dry and the wing
and tail feathers kept separate. Any large city dealer in chickens will
probably take your feathers. By-products often make the difference
between plus and minus in a year's business.
The winner of the first prize of one hundred dollars in the Junior
Poultry Contest of the Oregon Agricultural College tells this story:
RAISING CHICKENS
Boys and girls should raise chickens in the city as well as on the farm
because it pays and is a fine occupation. It is a work that never grows
tiresome and new experiences are always awaiting you. Various theories
are advocated as to the proper manner of feeding and housing to get
the best results but simple rules are the best to begin with. Plenty
of clean water, clean houses and yards and good feed are needed to get
the best results. Spade up a little in the chicken yard every day that
is pleasant, but if it is cold and in wet weather provide a scratching
shed. Keep the hens busy. Read the bulletins furnished free by the
government and the various experiment stations. Also subscribe to a
good poultry paper. The ideas you will get from these together with
your own experience will make you a successful poultry raiser. By doing
all that was stated above I was able to win first prize in the poultry
contest just closed.
CLARENCE A. HOGAN
SUCCESS WITH CHICKENS
The contest of the Portland Junior Poultry Association has closed. It
lasted a whole year, and it seemed as if it would never come to an end.
But if it had not been for the contest I would never have known many of
the interesting things I now know about chickens.
I had twelve white Leghorn hens and a cock entered. They were all
little beauties and I enjoyed working with them very much.
They laid one thousand six hundred twenty-two eggs during the year. The
eggs were worth from twenty-five to sixty cents a dozen. We fed them
wheat, corn, barley, oats, and bran in which table scraps were mixed,
oyster shells, grit, prepared beef scraps, charcoal, and green foods
such as grass from the lawn, cabbage, kale, and lettuce and other
green things from the garden. Each hen made us a profit of two dollars
and seventy-two cents for the year.
Chickens need lots of care. Their house must be cleaned out, there
should be some fresh ground dug up in the yard, and they need some
green food every day. Papa took care of the house, and I mowed the lawn
and gave them the clippings and gathered cabbage leaves, kale leaves,
and lettuce leaves out of the garden and gave them each day.
In the spring time we let them out a few minutes every morning to get
bugs and worms. They soon had all the bugs and worms scratched out
of the garden and then they ran out in the yard and scratched up the
flower beds, which did not please mamma very well. After that they
wanted to go to the neighbour's yard but we had to keep them up. This
was before we made the garden.
Chickens make nice pets. They are much nicer than dogs or cats, and
if you take good care of them they will pay well beside. I had a nice
little white Leghorn hen I called "Petty." When she was a little
chicken I would catch her every day and play with her. She would go in
the nest and wait for some one to take her out and pet her. She got so
tame that I could catch her any place in the yard. I would go in the
yard and get her and take her out in the garden and dig for her and let
her find the bugs and worms.
I had another little chicken that I called "Jim." He was a cute little
rooster. When he was just a little chicken I would put him to bed every
night and when he grew a little older he would not go to bed alone.
One night we weren't at home at his bedtime and when we came home that
night we heard a funny little noise in the back yard. It was raining
and Jim had gone under the sweet pea vines to sleep instead of going
into his box.
The first little chicks we hatched we took away from the hen and raised
them by hand. For about a week after they were hatched we put them in
a basket and covered them over with warm, woollen cloths and set them
by the s
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