Jasper Republican, Volume 2, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 October 1875 — An Amateur Farmer. [ARTICLE]

An Amateur Farmer.

A man named Cary came down to our country a short time ago and bought a little farm just below Us on the river. He didn’t profess to know much about farming, and the most wonderful stories have been floating about concerning his performances. Cooley related some of them to me the other day, but, of course, I allow something for exaggeration. He said: “ Well, Cary’s just the most phenomenal agriculturist in the State. : Do you believe that he actually came over to ask me if he ought to plant mashed potatoes in hills or sow them broadcast; and when I asked him what he was going to plant them mashed for, he said that he preferred that variety for the table to eat with gravy. Then when he put in his com what does he do but buy eight or ten gross of boxes of white felt com-plasters and sprinkle them around over the fields as a fertilizer, after which he safrout out four dozen Faber’s. black lead-pencils in the garden next to the asparagus bed. When he told me about it he said he was convinced that there was money in raising lead pencils, provided you took great care in harvesting the crop; but he said he couldn’t tell for the life of him how they grow those square pieces of india-rubber with which you erase lead-pencil marks. He said he’d planted some in a corner of his long field, but they hadn’t come up, and he thought maybe the seed might have been bad. AwfUl, isn’t it? “ Then on Thursday he asked me what time of the year I plowed for heifers, and when I came to inquire I' found he thought a heifer was some kind of an amazing potato. When I corrected him he began to tell me how he had been frying to swarm oysters by daubing molasses on a hive and beating on a tin pan with a stick. It was only the other day I asked him why he didn’t put up a worm fence on the north side of his pasture, and he told me he wasn’t afraid of worms. They couldn’t hurt him, and he wasn’t going. to the expanse of building a fence to keep them out. The ignorance of that man is simply scandalous. I believe he’s capable of planting parasols so as to raise a crop of umbrellas. You can’t never count on a man like that. “ Why, I actually found him out in the woods with an auger boring an oak tree, and he said his hired man told him that was the way they got soft soap. It ran up with the sap, and bulged out when a hole was made. When I discouraged him from frying any further he talked across the field with me and told me that he had two thousand dollars buried in his cellar because he understood that compound interest doubled money in eleven years, and he was' going to keep his where it was safe and let it double in peace. Then he asked me if I grafted my egg-plant frees or just let them grow as they were and waited till the fruit got red before knocking it off with a pole. “He said this thing of farming confused him like the mischief. When he first planted potatoes he waited for the potatoes to come out on the branches of the vine, and after a while somebody told him that they grew on the roots. Sowhen his tomato vines grew he imagined that the tomatoes also were on the roots, and he dug every- vine up to hunt for the tomatoes and spoiled the whole crop. He told me yesterday that he was going to cut down his apple trees to-day and run them through the threshing-machine to thresh off the apples, and I’m just on my way over to see how he does it. Good morning.”— Max Adder, in N. F. Weekly. —An over-sea-er—A sailor.