The expense and labor of preparing and tilling soil is too great to allow you to plant poor seed. The stock-breeder does not take his sickliest, poorest specimens for breeding purposes, but rather selects the best and most nearly perfect specimens; you should be careful to do the same with your plants. The farmer’s work is just as important as the stock-breeder’s. It should be the aim of each to improve the strain and produce the best possible result. Therefore, if you are growing corn, plant seed only from the stalk that produced the most and the best ears of corn. It is good to send fine ears to market and get the best price for them, but if you save only your scrubby ears for seed, next year you will not have fine, perfect ears of corn to send. So select of your very best for seed purposes, and if your best is not good enough, then buy from a better grower who has the best. Aim to produce an ideal ear of corn. It can be done, and you might as well do it. Only in this way will you find your corn crop paying you for your time and labor. If you carefully follow this every year, you will find your acre annually producing more and more corn without any additional labor or expense. That is one trick in making farming pay. It is a trick that holds good with every garden crop as well as with corn. It won’t do to wait until harvest time to find out if the seed you have planted is any good, if you have to buy your seed and want to make a profit from your garden the first season. This simple method of testing seeds may save you time and money. Get your seed early in the season, select about one hundred and put them between two moist pieces of flannel, which in turn are placed between two soup plates. Keep the flannel moist (not soaking wet with water standing in the dishes), and as soon as the seeds have sprouted, count the proportion of live ones. If only a few of them have sprouted, you will know that you cannot afford to give ground up to the use of such poor seed. The larger the proportion of your test seeds that sprout, or “germinate,” as this process is called, the better for your profit, if you plant from this same stock or assortment. Be sure you deal with a seed house that has a reputation at stake; and if possible go there yourself and see the man who really knows about seed: generally there is only about one man in a concern who does know his business. If you answer attractive advertisements and buy at “big bargains” you may lose your money, or, what is worse, you may be kept waiting from day to day till your planting days are over, or worst of all, you may plant poor seed. The dates of planting given throughout this book are for the latitude of New York. In Northern New England planting should be about three weeks later. All the middle western states can be figured the same as New York: but all states south of Pennsylvania may be figured twelve days in advance for every one hundred miles southward.