Part 23

Aug. 3.--There may be more argumentative jobs than thinning apples, but, as yet, I have not come across them. For the past couple of weeks I have been constantly on the defensive. Everybody seems to think that I am more destructive than a windstorm and that I am simply wasting apples. But the last time Mr. Clement came to see the orchard he said that there was altogether too much fruit, that it would not mature properly, and that if I wanted good fruit I would have to pick off a large percentage. Mine not to question why, mine but to do or die--and I went at it. In all the time I have been able to spare from other work and from arguments I have been stripping apples from the trees until the ground is covered with them. It does look like a slaughter, but there are still so many apples on the trees that there should be a big enough crop to satisfy any one. Besides, I have a little demonstration of the value of thinning the apples that satisfies me entirely. There are two branches of the Red Astrachan that according to the traditions of the orchard have never borne on the same year as the rest of the tree. When we were spraying in the spring these branches had such a trifling sprinkling of blossoms that I thought they were going to live up to their reputation. The rest of the tree was full of bloom. However, the whole tree was sprayed thoroughly and the straggling blossoms on the branches that were supposed to have missed were saved as well as the rest. At the present time the Red Astrachans are ripe and the two off-year branches are fairly well loaded with magnificent apples. Now that each stray blossom has matured in a perfect apple those branches are a sight worth seeing. Of course the rest of the tree is loaded, but the apples are small and many of them are badly shaped. All the best apples are on the two branches that were supposed to have missed. And I am inclined to think that the big apples on these branches would weigh fully as much as the small apples that are crowded on any two similar branches in the other part of the tree. And the big apples are not only a delight to the eye, but they are ripened better and are of finer flavour. An examination of that tree would convince any one that it does not pay to have too much fruit on the tree, but I seem to be about the only one it has convinced. "It just happened that way."

When Mr. Clement ordered the thinning to be done I admit I started at it with reluctance. There was one tree in particular that I hated to touch. It is a small tree that has nothing in it but fruit wood and every twig and spray is loaded. No one is able to tell me what kind it is, but those who are familiar with the orchard say it is a better apple than the Spy. Now, if there is a better apple than the Spy I want to know what it is. Yet they say that in the winter when they wanted a good apple to eat they would always take this one in preference to all others. Up to the present I have tasted no apple that suits my taste so thoroughly as a good ripe Spy and my mouth is watering already at the prospect of having something better. I have a sneaking hope that it is a new variety. I know that there are a few natural fruits in the orchard that grew from roots of the planted trees after the grafts had died. Wouldn't it be great luck if this was one? I cannot imagine how it could be a better apple than the Spy and not be known to everybody, if it is an established variety. Anyway, this tree is so beautifully loaded that it has been the show tree of the orchard. I always take every one to see it. But when Mr. Clement looked at it he said, "At least one-third of those apples should come off"--and they have come off. When he looked at the tree the fruit was not sufficiently developed for him to say what the variety is--especially as it is said to be better than the Spy. The number of apples that are better than the Spy must be very limited, but he did not seem to know what they could be any more than I do. I guess he must like Spies, too.

Though it was a painful job to pick so many apples off my pet tree, I was not much happier when thinning the Spies. I wished that there was some way of making them all mature properly, but as that way does not seem to be known to the scientists I did as I was told. But I didn't thin very savagely. I confined myself largely to apples that were badly formed or showed some blemish. Here and there on the lower branches there were occasional scabs and a few appeared to have been bitten or stung by insects, but on the whole the fruit looks clean and thrifty. The Baldwins, Kings, and Pippins were well loaded, but did not need any thinning. The chief destruction took place among the Ben Davises and Pewaukees. According to Mr. Clement, they had twice too many apples, and I guess he was right, for some of the branches were breaking under their load of fruit some weeks ago. I did not mind stripping the fruit from these inferior kinds, and it was an easier job as all I had to consider was the number of apples to be left on the branches. They were all clean and well formed, but on the Pewaukees especially they were so plentiful that some branches looked like clusters of grapes. On one branch I found a cluster of fifteen apples growing so close to one another that they could not move. They were wedged together like Brazil nuts. It would be impossible for such clusters to mature and colour properly, and thinning them out seemed to me a perfectly reasonable process, though when other people saw the apples on the ground they protested and could not understand why so much fruit should be wasted. Judging from all I have heard thinning apples must be something new in this part of the country.

Aug. 5.--Now that the celery is banked up and blanching properly I feel like expressing surprise that more farmers do not raise this excellent vegetable. It is easy to raise--the proof being that I can raise it. Every year we have had better luck with the celery than with anything else in the garden. We sow the seed in the spring when the ground is warm, transplant early in August, and then keep the ground clean. An hour's work each week sufficed to care for five hundred plants. The celery has been no harder to attend to than the potatoes. I am afraid too many people regard celery as a luxury, and would only think of raising it to sell. Our experience has been that we do not tire of it even though we have it every day in the fall and winter, and I regard it just as necessary to our winter supplies as potatoes. In the past we have pitted it in trenches in the ground, but last winter the mice got into some of the trenches, and this year they are so plentiful we do not dare to take any chances. The intention is to make a concrete root-house in a side-hill and keep the celery in it. This vegetable has something of a high-toned reputation because it is always served at banquets, but there is no reason why it should not be on every farmer's table. When it is crisp and well developed everybody likes it. All it needs to make it grow properly is an abundance of fertiliser and that is easy to get on the farm. We raise our celery in an old barn yard and I have yet to find any that beats our home grown. Our favourite is the White Plume, and though it is listed as a fall variety we have had it in first-class condition in February and a neighbour managed to keep it in a cellar all through March. Besides being good eating I am assured that its food and even medicinal values are high.

An altogether too meagre newspaper report tells that when President Creelman of the O.A.C. was addressing the guests at a luncheon given by the directors of the Industrial Exhibition in Toronto he said that there is a crying need for fun on the farm. I have noticed that. Farms are terribly serious-minded places. It was a city poet, not a country poet, who wrote:

"I dance at work, I dance at play, I dance the whole d--d livelong day."

Hard work seems to kill a man's capacity for fun, and of hard work on a farm there seems to be no end. But if Professor Creelman has any scheme for enlivening the labour of the farm so that men will sing at their work he will do as much for them as he can by teaching scientific farming.

THE BURDEN OF LABOUR

Behold, O God of seedtime, Thy children, how they toil! Scattering the seed before Thee On the altar of the soil. Thy little birds with music Disport on joyous wing, But we who feed the nations, We are too tired to sing.

Behold, O God of harvest, The burden of our days, We gather in Thy bounty And may not stop to praise. Thy little birds around us The spell of music fling, But we who feed the nations, We are too tired to sing.

O God of those who labour In field and mill and mine, With whirling wheels to drive us, Lo, we are also Thine! Thy little birds a-lilting Come back to us each spring, But we who feed the nations, We are too tired to sing.

Aug. 8.--When it comes to appreciating the bounty of nature you should go to a city. That's where you hear the stimulating talk. When I was in Toronto last week I heard more downright blowing about crops than I have heard in the country in the past year.

"Say! I wish you could take a run out to my place and see my garden," exclaimed one enthusiast after we had shaken hands and I had proudly pressed my callous spots into his soft and ladylike palm. "I tell you it's great."

Having had a city garden of my own years ago, and farther south, I couldn't help asking a few leading questions.

"Are you going in for specialties or doing ordinary mixed gardening?"

"Oh, I have a little of everything," he replied with the jaunty air of a man determined to bluff it out. "Say! I had a tomato for breakfast out of my own garden this morning."

I looked properly astonished, and even went so far as to admit that all the tomatoes I had enjoyed so far this season had been bought in a grocery store.

"Yes, sir! And I have had a tomato for breakfast from that garden every morning for the last three mornings."

"I notice that you speak of your tomato in the singular. Don't the other members of the family like tomatoes?"

"Aw, see here," he protested with offended dignity, "I'm not running a farm. I'm gardening on a town lot."

"Quite so. How is your squash doing?" I began to use the singular also.

"Say!" he exclaimed in a confidential tone, seeing that I understood something of his difficulties, "I admit that that squash was a mistake. The vine has already covered the carrot bed and the gravel walk, and is trespassing on my neighbour's lot at the rate of one yard of vine and three big leaves a day. It is making my garden look like a tropical jungle, and there isn't a sign of a squash on it yet, though there have been plenty of blossoms."

"How much space have you under garden?" I asked abruptly.

"Well," he squirmed, "we have a forty-foot frontage, and the garden runs back about thirty feet, but I haven't got it all under vegetables. We have a fine peach tree and a lilac bush, and my wife has a couple of flower beds in one corner, but I have all I can really attend to. It is intensive gardening all right, but we have been having something from it every day since the first radishes and lettuce came in."

Further conversation brought out the fact that he has four stalks of corn in his garden, and that some day soon he is going to have green corn for dinner. His corn is doing fine, by the way, and doesn't seem to be affected by the heat and drought.

Another city farmer had been having some trouble and wanted to know if I could tell him what it was. His vegetables have been acting freakishly. They grew too fast at first, put on too much top, turned yellow, and then seemed to burn out in spite of watering and much cultivation. When I found out how much fertiliser he had surprised his eight-by-twelve patch of ground with I diagnosed the case as one of water-brash or some similar form of soil indigestion. I advised him to put his garden on a spoon diet till it got back to normal. At the present time it is evidently so strong that it is heaving the roots out of the ground. Another man complained that his troubles were due to a city ordinance that forbade the use of water during the recent hot spell.

"If I had been at home," he explained, "things would have been different. But I went away with my family for a two-weeks' holiday and left the garden to the care of a man who does odd jobs around the neighbourhood. I told him above all things to water it regularly, but as soon as he heard that the city forbade the use of water in that way he shut right off instead of finding some way of doing it at night when no one was looking. It's a corker how careful some people are about the law when it lets them get out of doing work."

But in spite of these occasional failures the crop reports for Toronto are very good. Cucumbers seem to be thriving especially well in captivity, and carrots that are kept in solitary confinement are doing wonderfully. If reciprocity is passed and the yield of canned vegetables is normal Toronto will pull through the winter all right.