In this land, where the four seasons are clearly and distinctly defined, spring comes to us with a beauty unknown to those who dwell in lands which do not possess such unmistakable divisions of the year. If the winter was snowy, frosty and stormy, it had in its place sufficient enjoyments to make us love it; but now that it has passed, budding spring, with its ever-present deep green, comes to us with a bound, with a new pleasure of anticipation, added to its reality after it is once here.
How quickly our spring comes to us may, perhaps, be best shown by instancing that the last flurry of snow of one season was on the 7th day of April, and on the 20th of April the cattle were out feeding on the grass. A more abrupt change in any given locality is not to be found in any land, and stock generally is soon feeding upon the fields. Fruit trees were in blow three weeks before. Some of the most beautiful sights in nature are now afforded in our land by our fruit trees, laden with their pink and white blossoms, among which darts the industrious honey bee, and beside which are the deep green fields of grass or grain. Among our pastures, at the same time, nature is most prodigal of her beauties. The dandelions dot our fields with their yellow heads. These are the dandelions we used in our childhood days to pluck and hold under the chins of our companions. If the reflected light from the flower on the chin was yellow, partaking of the flower, our companion “liked butter,” but if not yellow our companion “did not love butter.”
Tiny blue violets are also among our fields, and many delicate blue garlands are woven by young hands, hung about our dwellings, and many times find their way into our schools and upon the teachers’ rostrums. The famed primrose of old England is no prettier than our wee violets, and for variety of color and deepness of the same we can safely invite comparison with any land under the sun.
Our clover meadows already wave with the breezes. Walk among the clover and see the ground-hog as he sits upon his haunches beside his hole of retreat, and see how he eyes your every movement. If you do not get too close, nor come upon him too suddenly, he quietly allows you to enjoy a good look at him. Make the first demonstrative motion and he disappears in an instant under the surface. This ground-hog is about the only universal rodent we have with us, and his ravages are so light that as a rule we do not seek his extermination. On the typical occasion referred to, seeding began about the middle of April, and was vigorously prosecuted, until by the end of May it was almost all accomplished. Grains first sown at this time almost completely covered the ground. This was about two weeks earlier than usual. It has generally been a rule among farmers to have their seeding all done by the 24th May, so as to have the leisure to celebrate that day at some neighboring town.
The old-fashioned way of seeding by hand, broadcast, is among the things that were. After that came the broadcast seeding machine. Now seeding machines are drills that put the seed down into the ground at any required depth and effectually cover it. Seed drills are also used as cultivators, and most excellent ones they make, too, so that our lands are now much better prepared for seed than formerly. The farmer who does not possess a seed drill is now considered only half equipped and not up to the mark. This change in the method of farming has given rise to enormous manufacturing businesses, for to supply three-fourths of the farmers of Canada alone with seed drills, any one at a moment’s reflection can see, must make a great business for manufacturers. And when our grass and grain come to maturity, light mowers will cut the first, and the ingenious complex binder will cut and bind the grain and leave it all ready for drawing in. In no country under the sun has agriculture made as great progress as in Canada during the last two decades. Labor-saving machines are as near perfection among us and as plentiful, and far more so than among any people of anything like the same population. Whenever any of our people get an idea that we are slow, just let such semi-discontented persons travel about the land of our forefathers in Britain or on the continent and he will return home fully convinced that they have not yet fully awakened up.
Foul weeds are annually becoming more prevalent among us. We are, in fact, annually seeing weeds in our fields which we never saw before, and whose name even we do not know. So from this fact alone, the old process of farming would not do now at all, neither would fourteen successive crops of wheat on one field, as has been done in Canada. The means of communication are now so quick that somehow these foul weeds of distant parts get generally disseminated over the land and are no longer locally confined to certain areas, supposed to be their individual homes, as they were formerly. Look along our railway tracks and you will frequently notice at the sides of the line weeds which you never saw before. It is only, then, a question of a season or two, when they will get into the neighboring field. There is, however, no need to be discouraged, for if we only look at the lands of the Old World which have been cultivated for a thousand years, we find all the foul weeds we know so far, and many dozens of kinds which we never saw before. Summer fallow and root crops, of course, is the first remedy. Our people are yearly putting in a greater area of roots and feeding more cattle. Our prized privilege of sending our cattle to the British markets alive was formerly one of our greatest boons, and we must try by all means to keep all cattle diseases out of our land, so that Britain will regard us as the favored people. Australia is too far away for live stock shipments. As for the United States, the climatic conditions are such there that we can grow healthy cattle when theirs are affected and beat them; that is to say, we can send live cattle and make a good profit when they cannot, but must send dead meat.
Seeding down and grass feeding upon our fields is another good method to rid our lands of these foul weeds. When the foul plants are young, by eating the fields pretty close our flocks nip off the foul stalks, and keep them from seeding. But if the plant be an annual, during the latter part of the season such pastures can with profit be turned into a late summer fallow, and thus be cleared. Wire root is got rid of by turnips and thorough cultivation. But perhaps the easiest and laziest way to get rid of this pest, which gets down so deep in lighter soils, is to sow buckwheat on such fields thick and heavy. Many farmers assert that a stout crop of buckwheat will choke the wire root out, and leave not a root alive. Ordinarily our farmers sow buckwheat only for this purpose, and to plough down as a green crop for manure. Very few of our farmers, in fact, will grow buckwheat for a crop, and consider it beneath the dignity of the quality of their fat lands to raise buckwheat as a crop. That man partakes of the nature of the soil, is, perhaps, to most persons at first thought an anomaly, but yet it is so. Where the soil grudgingly gives to the husbandman a very moderate living, his hospitality in a certain sense partakes of the nature of his lands. While he does his best for you as a guest, still the heartiness and bountifulness of his larder, for man and beast, is in a measure subdued, as it were, and somehow the guest feels that he ought not to deprive the careful husbandman of too much of his essentials of living. The husbandman is necessarily cramped and bound as his farm is. But go among those whose lands are fat and fill the great barns, and where it’s a task to take care of his bountiful crops, and we find another kind of a man entirely. There’s no stint. Your horse may consume bushels of oats per day if he will, and if ordinarily good milk is not of your liking, cream is just as free as the milk is. Open-handed, big-hearted; a man one involuntarily likes, as you grasp his broad, brown hand, and his fingers give a tight squeeze. And such are the great majority of Ontario’s husbandmen, a people of whom any nation may justly feel proud.
I am wandering from my springtime, and will get back by saying that bee culture among us is becoming fairly developed. Food for bees is in such abundance among our fields and fruits and woods, that in the future this industry must necessarily be much larger. Fourteen years ago I saw a field of about eight acres sown with sweet clover, to feed the farmer’s bees. It was the sweetest smelling field any one
CANADIAN APPLES AT THE GLASGOW EXHIBITION—“THE BEST IN THE EMPIRE.”