I am certainly not the most able of dairymen, nor the most skilled among vegetable growers, and by no means am I to be counted amongst the ranks of the master teamsters of draft horses. If there is anything remarkable about my story it is that someone could know so little about farming as I did when I started out and still manage to make a good life of it.

In parallel with making hay on the ground, nearly every year I have also made some hay on tripods. The attraction of this method is that it only needs one day of good weather to dry the grass sufficiently before it is put on the tripods, and then the hay takes very little harm no matter what the weather, usually coming out green, dry and smelling of hay two weeks later when it can be baled or stacked.

I don’t recall seeing it coming, but in that brief moment of impact a lifetime’s worth of thoughts tore through my mind. First — I’ve just been kicked in the head! Associated with this sensation was something like the realization of an ever present fear of a lifetime of working with horses, a nightmare-worst-case-scenario made real. I fell to the ground, put my hand to my forehead and felt the warm gush of blood. My future passed before my eyes: I was going to be in a coma; I was going to have to relearn how to talk, how to walk, how to read, relearn how to learn; my memories would be wiped clean. I crashed to the ground and as I pulled my handkerchief from my pocket and pressed it to my mangled forehead, I realized I was still alert, I hadn’t passed out, still knew who I was, and where I was.

The original tree of the Family avocado was found by Prof. P.H. Rolfs, now director of the Florida Agricultural Experiment Station, on a place at Buena Vista near Miami, Florida, which came into his possession in 1902. The age of the tree at that time is uncertain, but it was probably 5 or 6 years old. It has the rather unusual habit of ripening its fruit over a period of 8 to 10 weeks. It was because of this peculiarity that the name “Family” was selected for it by Professor Rolfs, it being well adapted to the supplying of fruit for family use.

There are three general divisions or kinds of graftage, between which, however, there are no decisive lines of separation: 1. Bud-grafting, or budding, in which a single bud is inserted under the bark on the surface of the wood of the stock. 2. Cion-grafting, or grafting proper, in which a detached twig, bearing one or more buds, is inserted into or on the stock. 3. Inarching, or grafting by approach, in which the cion remains attached to the parent plant until union takes place.

We started to get a bad feeling about what kind of bug year we were looking at when we began picking off ticks in early March. That was not a good sign. Sure enough, the gardens felt the impact of not enough winter-killed insects as the cucumber beetles and flea beetles ate whatever they could find. Meanwhile, the animals were being eaten as well. The main ticks that we encounter here in the midwest are the American Dog Tick and the Lone Star Tick.