The manager should be an experienced trucker, competent to instruct and advise about the work of planting, growing and gathering. The growers meet each other at the station, and compare notes. They all learn what is known by the most expert among them. They can arrange to have one man gather up the crops from several places and make one load to the packing-house, taking turn about in this service. Small or poor growers may be admitted with a nominal payment, even as low as 25 cents, the remainder to be paid by a 5 per cent. deduction from his proceeds. The association and management can also fill the assembled orders of members for fertilizer, seed, implements and packing material, at wholesale prices. In time you will make your own boxes, erect a cannery for the surplus and even buy your own groceries co-operatively. You can form a credit society with unlimited liability, to receive on deposit the members’ surplus and borrow from the city. That money is lent, for productive uses only, to members of known ability and honesty, who give two similar members as security. When you get safely started in one kind of co-operative association, you will easily go to the next, as the Danes and the Irish have done. ST. LOUIS, MO. N. O. NELSON. CHAPTER I. THE GARDEN YARD No man knows, nor can know, the capacity of a yard of earth, for it is unlimited, just as the speed of the engine is unlimited. Just as with the engine, the only question is whether it would pay to make it do any more—it may cost too much. Where land is cheap, labor is high; there intelligent cultivation will pay, but intensive cultivation will not. That is the place where the field crops should be raised. But the garden crops should be raised right round the towns and cities and it is foolish to get to a distance from them. Stay right where you are and get the piece of land that is best for your purpose; buy it, if you can without paying too much for it; if not, rent it for as long a term as you can; or get permission to use the bit of land, the vacant lots—there are plenty even in the most crowded cities—and raise your truck and your income on those lots. Without separating yourself from your acquaintances or exiling your wife and children, learn to get your living out of the earth. Suppose that a man owns his house, even if it be but a bit of a bungalow, and suppose he has a little bit of land on which he can raise the most of what the family eats; he may have to work hard, especially if his family cannot help in the work, but at least he is independent; at least panics, lock-outs, change of circumstances or even loss of health will not reduce him to starvation.