One reader of this book, a dear creature, wrote her experience for a Crafts magazine. She got the acres, built her house, and raised one fine crop of--swans? nuts grafted on wild trees? partridge berries? No--three tons of hay! She called it "Three Acres and Starving"; I called it "Three Acres and Stupidity." She didn't eat the hay, and the Editor wouldn't publish my reply. Everybody raises hay and potatoes; so don't you raise any unless for your own use. Potatoes are a laborious crop, requiring constant care, manuring, cutting the seed eyes (on which there is much uncertain lore), hilling up or down according to drainage and rainfall, spraying with Pyrox or dusting with Paris green, and, neither least nor last, bug hunting. The seed is expensive, but for your own use you may plant from whatever seed, otherwise wasted, may grow on the potato vine, on the tops of the plants. The crop will be small potatoes and all kinds of varieties, which won't sell in the market but which make each dinner a surprise party. You may strike a new and improved strain, though there are over a thousand varieties of potato listed already. New creations of merit bring good returns, and 'tis the enterprising experimenter that reaps the honor and the harvest, and he is worthy of his reward. To select the most productive plants and breed again from these is, however, a more promising profit plan. Even then don't plant the tubers unless you will take the pains to soak the seed potatoes in scab preventer. If you won't, likely you will raise mostly scab, and the spores thereof will spoil your ground for potatoes for years. It costs little in money to make it--half a pint of formalin to fifteen gallons of water. Not guessed but measured gallons. Then soak for an hour and a half by the Ingersoll. Don't reckon that one little hour or a few will do just as well. With one hour they will be under-done and spotty, with three over-done and weakly. There is lots to be discovered yet about "the spuds." Sawdust is an excellent mulch for them, as for small fruits. When you store any seeds to plant, put carbolic moth balls with them. It checks insects and mice and helps to protect the planted seeds from birds. In a general way, with potatoes and with other things that you want good and plenty, get specific directions and follow them. Most people won't read directions; more can't follow them. Those people have their knives out for "book farmers and professors," but you can't improve on experience and experiment by the light of laziness or of nature. A delicate jelly is made out of the red outer pulp of rose berries. It would be romantic to develop a Rose fruit from those seed pods, as the peach was developed from the almond. We have invented stranger fruits than that, such as the Logan-berry and the pomato. But there is better chance for profit in doing the old things better, especially when the experiment costs little or nothing.