The Department’s Year Books are most interesting reading, and both its Professors and the state colleges will answer particular questions of citizens.

These and the various United States and State Experiment Station publications will serve instead of 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 them, as for small fruits.  When you store any seeds to plant, put carbolic moth balls with them. it checks insects and mice and helps to protect the planted seeds from birds.