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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Plowing, harrowing, and furrowing............. 7.50 (Too much.) Beans for seed.............................................. 3.12 1/2 Potatoes for seed...................................................... 1.33 Peas for seed........................................................... 0.40 Turnip seed............................................................. 0.06 White line for crow fence....................................... 0.02 Horse cultivator and boy three hours...................... 1.00 Horse and cart to get crop...................................... 0.75 ----- In all.....................................................................$ 14.72 1/2 My income was (patremfamilias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet), from Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold......$ 16.94 Five bushels large potatoes..................................... 2.50 Nine bushels small potatoes.................................... 2.25 Grass....................................................................... 1.00 Stalks...................................................................... 0.75 ----In all.......................................................................$ 23.44 Leaving a pecuniary profit, as I have elsewhere said, of...................................$ 8.71 1/2 This is the result of my experience in raising beans: Plant the common small white bush bean about the first of June, in rows three feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round and unmixed seed. First look out for worms, and supply vacancies by planting anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost clean as they go; and again, when the young tendrils make their appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with both buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. But above all harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and have a fair and salable crop; you may save much loss by this means. This further experience also I gained: I said to myself, I will not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth, simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas! I said this to myself; but now another summer is gone, and another, and another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues, were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up. Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each new year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. I saw an old man the other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe for the seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down in! But why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and his orchards-raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about a new generation of men? We should really be fed and cheered if when we met a man we were sure to see that some |
