the dust closes the pores through which the insects breathe. It
should therefore be applied when the leaves are dry.

Cutworms can be destroyed by winter plowing. Rotation of vegetables
will reduce the damage from insects, because each family has its
peculiar bugs. By constant change to new soil, the pests have no
opportunity to get a foothold.

With bugs, as with boys, only those who are interested in them and
therefore understand them can manage them. It is fun to study the
insects--and it pays.

Here's another use of "land." Maybe a pool in your garden or a dam
in a little brook in it may help out your home garden bank account.
Of course a pond a few square yards in extent will give even better
returns if you can sell its produce at retail near by.

W. B. Shaw, a seventy-year-old veteran who lost his right arm during
the Civil War, lives in Kenilworth, D. C., and clears $1500 an acre
every year out of mud puddles--if mud puddles can be measured by the
acre.

Mr. Shaw is a pond lily farmer, and despite his lack of his good
right arm, he poles his boat about his mud puddles and gathers in
the pond lilies. His is not exactly a "dry farm" and neither wet nor
cloudy weather bothers him. Furthermore, the demand for his pond
lilies in Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, and even New York,
and Chicago, is greater than he can supply.

Mr. Shaw secured this swamp for almost nothing, as it was considered
worthless. He divided it into fifteen pools with little dams between
them, and rollers on the dams to enable him to drag his boat from
one to the other. From May to late in September he is busy every
morning gathering lilies. His average is about 500 a morning, which
he ships in little galvanized iron tanks with wet moss.

Many school children know how to get results on a little land. Mr.
Mahoney, Superintendent of the Fairview Garden School, Yonkers, New
York, estimates that the total value of produce grown on the 250
gardens, composing the school plot, in all about one and one quarter
acres of land, was $1308, or at the rate of more than a thousand
dollars per acre. When it is taken into consideration that all the
labor was done by boys ranging in age from eight to twelve years,
this result is truly astonishing.

What may not adult skilled labor produce when applied freely to the
land.

CHAPTER IX

TOOLS AND EQUIPMENT--SPECIALIZED CROPS

To subdue the land with an ax, a plow and a spade is possible;
m