Photograph by Helen W. Cooke
Is This Work or Play?
The boys in your home school can form a Boys' Agricultural Club now. The first thing you need is information about other clubs. Your club will not be just like the others. It ought not to be. But if you know how the others are managed it will help you to manage yours. Send to the Secretary of Agriculture, Washington, D. C., and ask for Farmers' Bulletin No. 385 on Boys' and Girls' Agricultural Clubs. On page fifteen of this bulletin are suggestions as to an invitation to be sent out for the first meeting. If your teacher is willing you can hold the first meeting some Friday afternoon in the early spring at the school-house. If the teacher is not yet interested hold the meeting at some home in the neighbourhood. If you are acquainted with the county superintendent or the school commissioner, tell him about the club you want to start, and maybe he will arrange for the first meeting and get all the boys and girls in the county organized. You could have a local chapter of the club, with local exhibits and local prizes; then you could have a space at the county fair, and members of different clubs all over the county could compete for first prize.
The bulletin gives suggestions for a constitution, enrollment of members, and a scheme for cards on which to keep a record of the crop you are going to grow. There are rules, too, that each person who competes for prizes must observe.
A good many boys' clubs start in with growing a crop of corn, and girls' clubs with bread-making. They need not do these same things every year, although one can learn something new about growing corn, raising chickens, or making bread every year.
The country would be a better place to live in, if there were more boys' and girls' clubs.
ATTRACTING BIRDS
The country would be a better place to live in if there were more song birds there. I know of a shrewd firm of real estate men, who wished to attract a certain class of residents to their suburban section, knowing that others would follow and property become more valuable. They laid out the woodsy tract with as little change from the natural conditions as they could, and still have a sanitary, convenient, and comfortable suburb. They did not chop down the trees in order to run straight roads through, nor did they fill in the small gully that wanted to be a brook. They encouraged the brook and ran their roadways so as to avoid the big trees and give each building site a character of its own and privacy. Then they put a man in charge with strict orders to make the place attractive to song birds; to protect and feed them; to destroy their enemies. He was also to foster and encourage such wild flowers and ferns as grew naturally in the woods, and to propagate and increase them so as to make the place a paradise. The man entered into the spirit of their idea and succeeded wonderfully. The real estate men advertised and the right people came and were convinced and bought homes there and "lived happy ever after."