most books (except this one), if
properly filed, indexed, and crossindexed so that you can readily
turn to all the information on a given subject--on bugs, for
instance, before the insects have harvested your crop.

I am trying only to suggest things, not to advise, nor to induce my
readers to try to do anything that they don't like or have no
capacity for. It is difficult to make people understand that.

One reader of this book, a dear creature, wrote her experience for a
Crafts magazine. She got the acres, built her house, and raised one
fine crop of--swans? nuts grafted on wild trees? partridge berries?
No--three tons of hay!

She called it "Three Acres and Starving"; I called it "Three
Acres and Stupidity." She didn't eat the hay, and the Editor
wouldn't publish my reply.

Everybody raises hay and potatoes; so don't you raise any unless for
your own use.

Potatoes are a laborious crop, requiring constant care, manuring,
cutting the seed eyes (on which there is much uncertain lore),
hilling up or down according to drainage and rainfall, spraying with
Pyrox or dusting with Paris green, and, neither least nor last, bug
hunting.

The seed is expensive, but for your own use you may plant from
whatever seed, otherwise wasted, may grow on the potato vine, on the
tops of the plants. The crop will be small potatoes and all kinds of
varieties, which won't sell in the market but which make each dinner
a surprise party. You may strike a new and improved strain, though
there are over a thousand varieties of potato listed already. New
creations of merit bring good returns, and 'tis the enterprising
experimenter that reaps the honor and the harvest, and he is worthy
of his reward.

To select the most productive plants and breed again from these is,
however, a more promising profit plan. Even then don't plant the
tubers unless you will take the pains to soak the seed potatoes in
scab preventer. If you won't, likely you will raise mostly scab, and
the spores thereof will spoil your ground for potatoes for years.

It costs little in money to make it--half a pint of formalin to
fifteen gallons of water. Not guessed but measured gallons. Then
soak for an hour and a half by the Ingersoll. Don't reckon that one
little hour or a few will do just as well. With one hour they will
be under-done and spotty, with three over-done and weakly.

There is lots to be discovered yet about "the spuds." Sawdust is an
excellent mulch for th