NORTH ISLAND RURAL LETTER.

Otago Witness, Issue 3029, 3 April 1912, Page 16

NORTH ISLAND RURAL LETTER.

By John Sfens. A NEW NOTE IN RURAL LIFE. That lioinipterous insect the cicada, popularly called locust, has been very little in evidence with us this summer. In ordinary summers on warm dry bush ridge tops, and in bosky basins, well out of the wind, its saw-saw chirp is continuous night and day. In places where they usually congregate in battalions I have only heard the sing-song of a solitary lifeless individual. I have heard the opinion expressed by a fruit and potato buyer that in the rain belt areas neither apples nor potatoes will be found to keep well during the coming winter. One settler left a portion of his potato crop under the temporary protection of a coating of straw. Rain came, and he was unable to bag them up. The comparatively warm rain penetrated the straw, and the sequence was a serious loss of tubers through an attack of blight. He set to work and removed the healthy balance to quarters in a dry shed, and since then he has not noticed any further development of disease. Our bulbs are beginning to send up their leaves above ground, and some of tho earlier varieties are already flowering. The capacity and conservation of Nature in its working in silence and in secret is very aptly illustrated in the bulb world. Every petal of those charming and attractive flowers has been stored in the little spherical and unattractive-looking brown knob. The auturac warmth in the earth induces the bulb ta shoot forth its fibrous and feeding roots, and then in a few weeks we behold a miracle in flowers of imposing proportions, with their charm of attractive freshness, purity in colouring, and wealth of sweet perfume. The majority of us human beings admire flowers, for their outward and visible manifestations of beauty, and give little or no (nought to the enchanting appanage of construction, nourishment, and sustenance. Quite a new note was introduced info the circumference of human life in " Consider fobserve well] the lilies of the field, how t.hor grow ; they toil not, neither do they spit- " Soiornor arrayed himself in gorgeous raloxAi, the rrwgndfioono* and splendour of which was the admiration evem of the dazzling Orient. His robes and ornaments were gathered from the ends of the earth. Tyre and Tarshish, Sheba and Saba, Egypt and Arabia. Palmyra and Babylon. India and Ceylon, and the isles of the Mediterranean all contributed their quota to clothe him in a radiant brilliancy so overpouring that when the sun shone upon him the beholders had to shade their eyes. Here, then, in a little brown bulb, as packed by the hand of the Creator, is a glory infinitely more gorgeous than that of Solomon's. By the way, I may say that this new note of human observation has long lain dormant; but we dwellers in the country are gradually rising to the measure- of its importance. This very note of observation is going to work wonders in the world. The world is thereby going to renew its youth. We horticulturists and agriculturists all take an interest in plants and animals, but. I fancy our concern has more in it of how to make such yield profit to our pockets than it is to give food to our minds and expansiveness to our intellects. Well, I'm not so sure but all tilings human begin in selfishness, and so I have good hopes of humanity, and can see a new era opening to country folk?; when they begin to discover the hidden riches in plants and animals. What a great amount of pleasure and profit they yield us when we becrin to look into their habits and their diverse innate peculiarities. The primitive hunter studied the ways of birds and animals *o ho could successfully trap, catch, and kill them. The aboriginal sportsman would open wide his eyes at a human being finding pleasure and profit other than by killing and cooking his quarry. The old gardeners ■who strove with might and main to develop powers and fruits would also widely open their eyes at beholding a modern naturalist deriving untold pleasure and profit from studying tho properties and functions of roots and stems and buds and the fibrous

construction of plants and trees with their potential chemical energies in earth and atmosphere. A week or two ago I told vou that I did not anticipate anything like a good mushroom crop this autumn, owing to the absence of the sun's caloric or heat in the turfy crust of our meadows. Some of our townsfolk have been greatly disappointed, ! and wondered why the appetising fungus had failed. They came out of the city time after time, but found none or next to none. The townsman lives largely under artificial conditions. With him the whole question of food resolves itself into a mere matter of money and giving an, order to his butcher, his baker, or hie grocer. Nature's banker is the sun. I was a thoughtless lad when I was first introduced to the culture of mushrooms by an old Highlander, who used to grow them in a

"sod" house for the table of one of Scotland's historic ducal families. This old fellow was entirely ignorant of scientific terms, and also of trie comj>osition and chemical properties of the mushroom, yet he must have made a study of the nature and germinating embryology of mushroom spawn. He knew live spawn from dead spawn, and he could manufacture, as I in those days thought, mushrooms by some secret spell. To me he was somewhat uncanny. Nowadays I can easily see how in a rude age certain men were looked upon as wizards. They manipulated certain elements or forces in Nature by being possessed of a certain amount of knowledge through observation, but they were entirely ignorant of the chemical properties of the constituents they operated with, and so their works were set down as miraculous. Today, to m,e, the miracle of the mushroom is none the less, only it's the Creator who is the wizard, and not old Peter Gilchrist, Well, let us look for a moment at the mushroom. The sheep and the bullock get their delicious chops and steaks from the surface of the meadows. They laboriously gather the elements of fat-forming and minerals above ground, but the mushroom, endowed by the Creator with endemic or peculiar chemical accomplishments, silently and in darkness collects and rnianipuates its alkalies and phosphates. As a vegetable the mushroom is one of the very richest in thoroughly wholesome and flesh-forming constituents. It is an illustration in point of now the Creator intended that man should not only be induced to satisfy his appetite, but that he should thoroughly enjoy the eating of his food from the dainty way in which the alkalies and phosphates, etc.. are compounded in this what you might call delectable natural savoury. What about the connection between heat and the growing of a crop of mushrooms? When mushrooms are grown artificially from spawn, the rhyoelium or generative white films, somewhat resembling mi'dew. requires a heat of not loss than 60dcg to successfully develop into the appetising fungus. That would indicate that the top spit in our meadows must bo warmed up to this degree of heat by the sun before the mycelium will run. It is the sun that puts fat and condition into lambs and wethers. I was conversing with a sheep-farmer the other day, who said that last season with leas grass he turned off more fat*. We used to think that rabbits would' become the premier pest, on native lands in the interior. They take poison readily, and consequently are comparatively easilykept down. It is the Californian quail that is the greatest pepfc on many Maori lands held bv Europeans. Certainly they afi'ord good shooting, and are kapai in a pie, but when they flutter down in hundreds (one man says thousands) on a newly-sown bushelearing they simply pick up almost every clover seed, and probably also not a few of the finer grass seeds. They lodge in scrubby gullies, and are supposed to hatch two broods of 12 to 16 each season. There are one or two Chinamen pursuing sheep-farming on the Main Trunk line with marked success. I am told that a Jap lias deve-loped the industry of raising strawberry runners for the Auckland growers. He employs a number of Europeans to assist him,' and ir. is said that his venture bids fair to develop enormously. In one district for some years back I have watched the proprietary dairying as against the co-operative system., and 1 havs no hesitation in arriving at a conclusion entirely in favour of co-operation, provided, o f course, that it is consistently and economically managed. In starting on cooperative lines it is advisable to make progress slowly, and not to forge ahead by moturing large liabilities. This particular district incepted co-operatively, but it branched out into quite a number of a<Viacent and even distant localities, and the consequence was that the expenses ran away with the profits, and the concern had to close down, and thus the proprietary elc-'Miit fcfot n footing. Every now and again one sees evident signs of dissatisfaction in settlers changing from one proprietary oonoern to ajiother. You heir dairy-, meri growling about their tests. Probably when a man shifts h» milk supply you hear of his test going up several poixnts. Yes, I actually say bo vera! points, (ot cjr>e man assures mo that such is the cane, <vnd from my knowledge of that individual J have no' hesitation in accepting his statement Butter-fat tests will never be satisfactory until we have a system of private or joint association-testing. Then the testing of individual cows, as repeatedly advocated bv the Witness, is triumphantly vindicated by results. In Sweden there are 662 cow-testing associations, and the increase per cow in the past, nine years has been 3.1741 b milk and 1091 b butter.