"Fair weather cometh out of the north," says the Book of Job, and fortified by this text I shall venture to say something about the spring weather. The last time I spoke about signs of fair weather it settled down and rained steadily for two weeks. But the clouds have blown away, clearing from the north, and to-day a fine, exhilarating north wind is blowing. Those who are weather-wise say that fine weather is at hand. We have had much rain, but not too much for the hay and wheat. The ground is as full of water as a soaked sponge, the wells are full to the brim, and all the streams are either overflowing their banks or full to the level of the ground. Enthusiasts say that never before has there been a better prospect of a good harvest. The fruit trees are crowded with blossoms that have not yet opened. The garden, looked at across the chicken-wire fence, shows the seeds and weeds all sprouting lustily, but the ground is too wet for any work to be done. A couple of days like to-day, however, will make things fit for hoeing and weeding.
I understand that there is a fortune awaiting the man who can hit on a sure plan for wintering bees. As an unsolved mystery it ranks with the bottle that cannot be refilled. Every sort of plan has been tried from burying the hives in pits or putting them in cellars to leaving them in the wind-swept open. Some years they winter successfully in one way and next year will all die off under exactly the same conditions. All kinds of plans have proven successful at different times, and then again have failed. A few weeks ago I helped to move a couple of hives that seemed strong and thrifty. They were heavy with honey, and it looked as if they had wintered properly. A week later every bee was dead and the hives were empty of honey. They had been attacked by robbers and cleaned out. How is it that they were unable to protect themselves? Wintering the bees seems to be the big unsolved problem of bee-keeping. If it were not for that bee-keepers would get rich too quickly, for when once a hive gets started properly on its summer work it does nothing but make money. This summer I expect to learn more about bee-keeping, for the bees are to be handled according to instructions furnished by the Agricultural College at Guelph. We are going to follow those instructions to the letter, even if we have to build a bee-house so as to "tack the instructions on the inside of the door," as advised in the circular.
The hen, when not kept within bounds, and when raised on the same farm as a garden, is a nuisance, but you can't help respecting her when you are asked to make yourself useful by gathering the eggs and find that you need a couple of twelve-quart pails to do the chore. With eggs at prevailing prices that sort of thing makes you feel that the Mint at Ottawa doesn't amount to so very much after all. But I have a dreadful secret to tell. All the poultry experts will call it heresy, and some poultry editor may hold me up to the scorn of the whole chicken-raising world, but I am going to tell it. This year the incubators have been loaned to ambitious amateurs, and all the chickens on this farm have been hatched out by nice, motherly old hens. They didn't have to have some one sit up nights with them, and they brought out a chicken from every egg but two. Besides, the chickens are so strong and healthy they have their feathers and are beginning to look like broilers at three weeks old. Of course, this is dreadfully unscientific. But it is "a condition, not a theory, that confronts us." Perhaps if I get time to look into the matter I may find that nature's way of raising chickens is scientific after all. Anyway, it is practical, and less than half the trouble.
May 6.—Spring is here at last, joyous, effervescent, carolling, busy spring. The fields, the streams, and the air are full of it. It is harder to watch than a three-ring circus. Every nook and cranny has its side show. The world is alive, alive, alive. The downpour of rain a few days ago delayed seeding, so that I had time to look about me while the miracles of nature were being performed. On going to the woodlot I was surprised to find the mayflowers, adder's-tongues, trilliums, Dutchman's breeches, and hepaticas already in bloom and the violets just opening. By giving shelter from the winds and letting the sunlight through their bare branches, the trees seem to make a natural forcing bed for the flowers, so that the woods stir to life earlier than the fields and gardens. And now the leaves are coming out. The beeches are red, the maples a yellow green, and the elms misty and undefinable. The pastures and wheat fields are a vivid green, contrasting beautifully with the cool, brown earth of the ploughed land. The birds are so busy with their housekeeping that they hardly have time to sing, but when they do sing they throw their whole souls into it. One afternoon I heard so much music coming from the top of an elm that I had to investigate. I thought all the birds must have put through a merger in music and were celebrating, but I found that one solitary brown thrasher was doing it all. I knew that it belongs to the mocking-bird family, but as it is a newcomer in this district I had never before heard it give an exhibition of its powers. It made an amazingly joyous racket for a while, varying its imitations with original bits of its own. And it expressed exactly what I was feeling at the time.
I wonder just what the poets mean when they speak of spring as being "balmy." Steamy would describe the condition of the air this morning for purposes of prose. It has the warmth and moisture of air in a greenhouse and is laden with earthy odours. The spring crops are going in with a rush, for the season is so late that every day counts. To-day we are discing corn-ground for oats, and this afternoon I am going to hitch a bag over my shoulder and sow the grain, just as they do in the great paintings for which American millionaires pay such fabulous prices. I am not doing it for artistic effect either. I would much rather do it after the manner of the O. A. C. and use a common, everyday seed drill, but, with only ten acres of spring seeding to do, it would not pay a struggling farmer to buy a seed drill, and every drill in the neighbourhood has a previous engagement this morning. A man doesn't need a drill many days in the year, but on those days he needs it mightily. I wish I had the use of one, but, since I have not, the work must be done by hand. Anyway it will be an experience, and it is a method of doing the work that has been much praised in both prose and verse as well as in pictures. If I am not mistaken, there are several popular hymns on the subject, and I know that there is a song in one of the kindergarten books. I shall look it up in a few minutes, so that I shall be able to sing at my work as a farmer should. I have no conceit, however, that my singing will help to make the day more musical, but it may scare away the hens and keep them from following me too closely and picking up the scattered grain. But in weather like this everything goes. It even sounds good to hear the men in the fields yelling at the horses and the women scolding at the hens as they chase them out of their gardens. And it is all because it is spring, spring, spring!
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.