Part 11

Speaking of hens in gardens reminds me that about the meanest job the hired man and I tackled this spring was changing the location of the garden and moving the chicken wire that was around it. That stuff could kink, twist, bend, break, and otherwise make itself objectionable in more ways than anything I ever had to deal with. Why doesn't some one invent a kind of chicken wire that can be moved when necessary? Of course, we moved it, by brute strength, but now that it is in place again it looks as if it had been rammed through a corn-sheller and then tramped on by the cows. Still it will turn hens, and perhaps when the wild cucumber vines and gourds begin to climb over it, it will not look so bad. And while on the subject of fences let me "put myself on record," as the politicians say, as believing that inventors still have a fruitful field ahead of them inventing farm fences. Rail fences are going out entirely because of the scarcity of timber, and board fences are going for the same reason. There are many kinds of wire fences on the market, all guaranteed to be horse-high and skunk-tight. Most of them are all right for a year or two and then they begin to sag and wires begin to break. Patching and stretching them when they begin to give out is no job for a man with a feverish temper. Besides, it is work that has to be done when farm work is beginning to rush, and a man in a hurry is usually irritable. And beyond all this I wonder what on earth people are going to do when they finally have to take down useless wire fences and put up new ones. You can't burn the old ones or roll them into reasonable compass. I doubt if the collectors of old iron can do anything with them. So what is to be done? The wire fences on the average Canadian farm would clutter up acres of ground if taken off to make way for new ones, and a piece of unemployed fence wire lying in the grass is about the trippingest, scratchiest thing a man can run into accidentally on a dark night or drive into with a team in the daytime. I think our inventors would make more money if they turned their attention from flying machines to wire fences for a while. This country is always going to need wire fencing, and millions of miles of it, and what is needed is a kind that will be serviceable and movable and that can be done away with when useless.

Word has just come that the trees are at the railway station, and that means more hustle. The thousand I planted in the woodlot last year did so well that this spring I got ambitious to finish the job of reforestation, and I sent for two thousand and five hundred. Wishing to get as great a variety as possible, so that some would be sure to thrive. I asked for white pine, Scotch pine, locust, catalpa, white elm, white maple, walnut, red oak, and chestnut. They are sending the whole list, and, as last year's work proved to me that planting three hundred trees a day is good, heavy work for a man and a boy, I expect we shall be fairly busy. In fact, as I think of the seeding and the trees, I feel like parodying Shakespeare and protesting lest

"This great sea of jobs rushing upon me O'erbear the shore of my mortality, And drown me with their sweetness."

That last word hardly applies in my case, but there are a lot of people in the country who claim to like work, so I shall let it stand for their benefit. I wonder if it would not be possible for the Forestry Department to devise a method of planting trees at a different season of the year. If they can be planted only in the spring, during seeding-time, the work of reforestation will never make much progress among the farmers of the country. Few of them have enough help to enable them to do the real spring work without taking on other jobs like this. And they are all the more reluctant to undertake the work because of the belief that a man who plants trees will never get any returns from his work. Of course that point of view is all wrong, but it is very prevalent. A man who plants trees for the benefit of his descendants is doing as much for them as if he put money in the bank for their use. It is just as wise an investment as any other that a man can make. But I am not going to argue out that question in such a busy time as this. If I think of it I'll take it up in the winter when there is little to occupy our minds. Just now I shall plant trees, and explain afterwards. Moreover, I had better get started or people will think I am guilty of "terminological inexactitudes" when I talk about being busy. This is no time to be sitting in the house pounding at a typewriter. I should be outside, getting sun-burned and hustling about the thousand and one things that are to be done. If the wonderful things that will be happening in all nature during the next few days are to be sympathetically described this spring, some one else will have to be assigned to the job. As far as I am concerned there is nothing in sight but work, work, work.

_May 9._--Two thousand five hundred trees are altogether too many for one farmer to undertake to plant in one season. There are too many other things to do at the time when the trees should be planted. Yet, nevertheless, and notwithstanding, the two thousand five hundred that I ordered are planted to the last seedling, and we still live. Moreover, that job of reforestation is done, and all that remains to do is to put a permanent fence around the woodlot and let nature take her course. There are twenty-four varieties of trees in that three acres, and if this year's planting does as well as last year's there should be a fine coppice before we are much older. While the government trees are doing well, I am especially interested to find that the whole woodlot is now swarming with sugar maple seedlings. The fact that the cattle have been kept out for the past couple of years has given the natural growth a chance, and there are places where the little maples are growing as thickly as they can push from the ground. I think it would be a fair estimate to say that there are ten maple seedlings to every seedling I have planted. Between this year and last year we have planted over thirty-five hundred trees, so the outlook for a future timber limit is fairly rosy, though I have no doubt wise people are right in saying that "I'll never live to see any good come from all this work." That all may be, but there is a kind of satisfaction in doing some work that you know you will never derive any benefit from. It is a pleasant variation from the usual method of doing work from which you are expecting great profits and then getting bumped.

The expert who sent me the pasture mixture to sow in the oat field did not furnish plans and specifications for getting the stuff into the ground. Some of the seeds seemed to be nothing but fluff and fuzz, and when I tried to sow them with a hand seeder they took the wings of the morning and I don't know where they landed. Being anxious to confine the stuff I was sowing to Middlesex county, I waited for a dead calm, in the hope that if I got the stuff floating over the field some of it would gradually settle down where it was needed. There were seven varieties of seed in the mixture, each of a different specific gravity, and I don't think it would be possible for any one to distribute it properly over the ground unless he put it in the same as the women folk sometimes put in garden seeds--by poking each seed into the ground with the finger. As that process would be rather slow, and would be likely to take up the rest of the summer, I decided against it. The hand-seeder had to be discarded, too, because I couldn't get the seed to feed through it evenly. After many trials and false starts, I finally had to go back to the old system of broadcasting and scatter the stuff by hand. Yesterday was an ideal day for such work. We had a series of thunderstorms, and for about an hour before each storm there was a lull:

"That strange silence which before a storm Shakes the forest leaves without a breath."

I was able to sift the seed over the ground in the still air, but after each storm the mud got stickier and heavier until it seemed that I was pulling up about as much oats at each step as I was putting in of grass seed. Sowing may be an artistic job, but as I thought it over I couldn't just remember how Millet represented the feet of the peasant in his celebrated picture. After yesterday's experience I feel safe in assuming that "The Sower" was not wearing patent leather pumps.

The orchard is certainly looking fine. The blossoms are just opening and on most of the trees they are plentiful enough to satisfy any one. Mr. Clement came over last week and sprayed them thoroughly with lime sulphur and arsenate of lead. The purpose of this was to destroy the insects that feed on the blossoms and to kill the leaf-curl worms. It was surprising to find how many of these creatures were commencing their ravages before the spraying had begun. I should never have noticed them in making a casual observation, but Mr. Clement ferreted them out for me and showed how they were feeding fat on my profits from the orchard. While he went on with the spraying I went poking around looking for matters of interest and found that the Baldwins were showing signs of some kind of blight. The leaves and blossoms were blackening as if they had been touched by frost. Mr. Clement said that he had never before observed anything like it. It seemed to be something new. A couple of days later he wrote to tell me that in Elgin county the lower branches of the Baldwins are affected in the same way and as yet no one has been able to offer an explanation. But I guess I hadn't better say much about this. Apparently I was the first to discover this blight, and it would be just like these scientific men to name it after me. I freely admit that they have a lot to get even with me for, but I hope that they will not take any such fiendish revenge as that. I don't want to go down to history in the same class with the man Bright who first developed Bright's disease. I rather wish I hadn't noticed that blight.

When I heard that morels were being found in the neighbourhood I simply couldn't restrain myself. The call of the fungus is something I cannot resist. Although I was tired enough from sowing that grass seed and dragging my feet out of the mud I put off milking for half an hour to make a search through the long grass by the roadside. Although I had once or twice enjoyed a dish of morels I had never managed to find a specimen, but last night luck was with me and I got seven beauties. When I tasted them before I regarded them as a rather feeble substitute for mushrooms, but they had a tang of their own that appealed to my palate. This time they were served differently and proved a supreme success. Some one had heard that to be at their best morels should be stewed in cream, and that was the way we had them for breakfast. While altogether different, they were every bit as delicious as the finest mushroom, and from now on if any morel within a radius of a mile escapes me it will be because I have become so practical a farmer that I no longer take any interest in the enjoyments of life. I have never seen morels on the bill of fare of any restaurant, but I can assure the epicures that they are missing something.

_May 11._--Say, it isn't fair of the banks to spring an important move like the Royal-Trader merger when a fellow is too busy with his spring work to give it proper attention. They might have known that I would want to look into the business in a careful and leisurely way, and here they go and put through their deal when I am all fussed up with other things. But that is a way they have. Most of the privileges they enjoy they got when no one was watching them. But we'll get around to them again one of these fine days, and perhaps, as Shakespeare says:

"Use them for our mirth. Yea, for our laughter when we are waspish."

I am glad I undertook to plant those trees in the woodlot this year. It is so satisfyingly ridiculous a thing to do that wise people have no time to criticise the way I am putting in the rest of my crops. It is more amusing than having the orchard attended to by the latest scientific methods. But I must be fair on this point. Although there were a few people who laughed noisily when they heard that I was going to place the orchard in the hands of experts, there are many others who are anxious to know just how the work is being done, and who openly envy me for having been able to arrange with the Department of Agriculture to give the demonstration. Some have gone so far as to prune their trees this year, and several professional pruners found all the work they wanted to do in this district. But I am afraid this will not help the cause of orcharding very much, for none of the trees are being sprayed, and the result is likely to be of a kind that would need the pen of Joel the son of Pethuel to describe properly. What the codling worm leaves, the caterpillar will destroy, and so on, and so on. You will remember the text.

The glorious spring we are having just now makes me feel in my bones that there is something about the season of growth that the scientists have not yet discovered. When everything is alive, from the grain of mustard seed to the mighty oak, and everything is bursting into life and bloom, I always feel that there are other forces at work besides heat and moisture. Wherever I turn, things seem to be flooded with life, as if life were a form of force like electricity--something too all-pervading and subtle to be isolated by scientific investigators. Life seems to be something apart from the chemical changes that take place in the seeds--something that compels these changes, but does not enter into the combination itself. At this season of the year the world seems to be flooded with an abounding vitality not noticeable at other times. As yet the scientists have not been able to make any more of it than have the poets, but it seems very real.

_May 14._--Last night I had only three hours' sleep, and all on account of that orchard. After an unexpected and wholly unseasonable snowstorm, the weather turned cold, and the signs all pointed to a sharp frost. An hour after sunset the thermometer registered thirty-four degrees above zero--just two degrees above the freezing point. I began to worry at once. I have seldom been more interested in anything than I am in that orchard, and it is not entirely because I am hoping for a profitable crop. This is the first time I have ever had a chance to follow closely the art of fruit-producing, and I am profoundly interested in the work because of the light it throws on man's partnership with nature. Mr. Clement has undertaken his share of the task in such a hearty fashion that I do not want to have anything interrupt us until the demonstration has been completed. So, as I said, when frost threatened I began to worry. It seemed as if the whole experiment might be defeated by a slight change in temperature. Every few minutes I went and consulted the thermometer, and it was slowly but surely edging closer to the danger-point. Not knowing what to do, I decided that I must do something. It was impossible to get after the experts at that hour of the night, and I was perfectly willing to do anything, however foolish, to save the buds so that our work of apple-producing might go on. Racking my memory for something that would give me guidance, I remembered having read somewhere that the vine-growers in France, when threatened by frost, build fires in their vineyards. On mentioning this, some one remembered that one hard summer, in pioneer days, one of our neighbours saved his corn from a June frost by lighting all the brush heaps and stumps in his fields, and that year he was the only man in the district who had corn. Some one else remembered having heard that out West they sometimes save part of their crop by making smudges that will lay a blanket of smoke over the fields. Of course, I hadn't seen anything in the bulletins or farm papers about that sort of thing, but I didn't hesitate. I was perfectly willing to do a dozen fool things, if one of them would by any chance protect the buds from frost. It didn't matter to me if I lit a torch that would cause laughter from Niagara to Lambton. I am getting used to being laughed at, and, as a very prominent Canadian educationist wrote when a fellow professor lost his pet dog,

"Vot did I told him? I dunno! I neffer said a vort! For ven von's leetle dog vos dead, A leetle more don't hurt."

A little more laughing wouldn't hurt me any, so I hunted up a bundle of rags and the coal-oil can and started for the orchard. Up to that time I had been rather ashamed of the fact that, owing to the rush of work, we hadn't been able to clear away the brush that had been pruned from the trees, but last night I was glad it was still there. It was in neat piles, anyway, and that made it handier to get at. As there was not a breath of air stirring, I selected a spot in the middle of the orchard, where I would not be in danger of scorching any of the trees, started my fire of rags and oil, and began to pile the green brush on it. In a few minutes I had a bonfire that would have been big enough to celebrate a victory of the people over the Big Interests. The night was so still that the flame and smoke went straight up into the air. But there was not enough smoke. Going to the stable, I got a forkful of wet straw and carried it to my bonfire. After throwing it on the fire, I had an excellent illustration of what Milton meant by the phrase:

"Cast forth Redounding smoke and ruddy flame."

In a few minutes there was a most satisfying blanket of smoke hanging over the trees and rolling through their branches. Of course, I knew that there was no frost as yet, but I had demonstrated to my own satisfaction that if it did come I could make all the smoke that was necessary. By this time it was almost twelve o'clock, so I set the alarm for three a.m., and turned in with an easy conscience. It is always just before sunrise that a frost strikes hardest, and I would get up and be ready for it. At three o'clock the alarm went off with a wholly unnecessary jangle, and after I had explained to the aroused and protesting family what the rumpus was all about, I took a peep at the thermometer. The mercury stood exactly at the freezing point. In a few minutes I had four bonfires, half smothered with wet straw, throwing up clouds of smoke. By the time the dawn began to appear in the east, the thermometer had shaded below the freezing point, and water in a pan by the door was slightly coated with ice. This made me redouble my efforts, and I certainly did get up a glorious fog. If those buds could be saved, I was going to save them. I kept up the good work until six o'clock, when the sun's heat began to be felt. Then I had breakfast and waited for Mr. Clement, like a little curly-headed boy who had done all his homework. I forgot to mention that to-day was the day decided on for the second spraying of the trees.

When Mr. Clement finally came, I couldn't wait to get his horses unhitched until I had told him what I had done, and what do you think? He just roared and laughed! Now I don't think that's fair. Scientific farmers have no business laughing at the rest of us. It is their business to do fussy things and let us laugh at them. Still, he wasn't so very bad about it. He soon let me see that what amused him was my enthusiasm about the work. He assured me that the situation might have been one where what I had done would have been exactly the right thing. At this stage, however, there is little danger of the blossoms being destroyed by frost. It is usually a frost that comes after the fruit is set that causes trouble, and, if two weeks from now there should be a cold snap, I should be doing exactly the right thing in making a blanket of smoke for the trees. It was very kind of him to spare my feelings in this way, but still I wish he hadn't been quite so much amused, and that his eyes didn't twinkle every time the matter was referred to during the day. Although I am getting pretty thoroughly seasoned, I still have feelings.

I don't care even if my bonfires were not needed, and if I did lose a few hours' sleep. I have done a whole lot of more foolish things than that, and got away with them by simply looking solemn. Moreover, I have more than once lost a night's sleep, and it wasn't always by sitting up with a sick friend, either. Any time during the early summer, if you waken up before daylight and see a big light in the sky down in this direction, you needn't imagine that somebody's buildings are being burned. It will probably be me having bonfires in my orchard. Mr. Clement admitted that it would be all right, and I don't care a bit if he did grin a little at the time. We are going to make a success of that orchard if it is humanly possible, and I had my reward for last night's exploit in another way. I had a chance to hear the wonderful concert of the birds that greets the dawn, long before even the most industrious of us humans is stirring. But I am not going to say much about that just now. I am too much hurried to deal with anything so poetic. It will serve as a subject for a special article later on.

_May 16._--Last week I made up my mind to write an article founded on experience, but I found that _The Farmer's Advocate_ has to some extent anticipated me. It has an editorial dealing with the subject I had in view, but, instead of giving up my article, I shall quote what _The Advocate_ says, and then proceed with my own thoughts on the same point:

"One of the greatest mistakes a farmer can make is yielding to that insidious tendency to dull his mental energy by sheer physical exhaustion. There are so many things to do about a farm, and so few hands to do them, that, unless one is careful, he finds himself working on into the night, when he should be resting, if not sleeping. Morning comes apace, finding his senses heavy; but necessity, that stern prompter, opens his eyelids and drives him through another round of duty. Day after day this continues, till unconsciously he slips into a routine, and, despite natural inclinations and resolutions to the contrary, gradually settles into ruts. He loses his mental grasp and outlook, becomes the slave of his own work, drags through it as best he may, with dulled perception, flagging enterprise, and dull-grey outlook, where nothing matters much but grimly holding on. The future holds nothing of promise, and only the old ways are safe."

Farm papers are usually so unrelentingly practical that it is good to find one sounding so healthy a note of warning.