Besides promoting the health of yourself and family, you will be adding largely to the enjoyment of all, and especially of the children. Who has not noticed the eager fondness of children for fruit? There is scarcely anything that delights them more. If then a few rods of ground devoted to small fruits will contribute not only to the health but to the happiness of your children, will it not pay? Will not anything pay that makes home more attractive to your children? Home, with its delightful memories, not the least of them the visions of delicious strawberries, and fragrant raspberries, and scarlet currants, and huge blackberries, and clusters of grapes.
But it pays also in an increased intelligence. One cannot cultivate his garden of small fruits without calling into exercise his intellectual faculties, and that in many ways. He will think in a different line from that which his mind traverses when he is engaged in the other and ordinary pursuits of the farm. The mind is enlarged by the contemplation of an enlarged variety of subjects. To grow these small fruits successfully one must study their requirements, not a difficult study by any means, but this exercise of the mind in another channel quickens its perceptions and awakens its activities. Besides, from the very nature of the operations, so different from the rougher and more muscular operations of the farm, there is brought into action the more delicate, shall we not say the more refined, qualities of thought and action, so that the man becomes more complete and symmetrical intellectually. And the children will grow up with enlarged knowledge and more refined tastes, just in proportion as the ordinary routine of farm life is varied and enlivened by the cultivation of those things which are usually embraced in the term horticulture.
On the score then of intelligence, of refinement, of health, of enjoyment, we commend to our farmers the cultivation of small fruits. Remember, we say cultivation, not the planting and leaving of them to take care of themselves; that is worse than not to plant at all, for it only ends in disappointment and disgust. But a garden of small fruits, well and lovingly tended, will repay a thousand fold all the care and thought bestowed upon it, in the increased health, happiness, intelligence and refinement of its possessors.
INDEX.
A.
Acme Tomato, [184]
Advice to farmers on fruit growing, [82]
Agawam Grape, [183]
American Arbor-Vitæ, [20]