I am not the only one who admires her landscape, her
flower gardens, and her woodcraft. Many others do honor to her tastes
and to the evidence of thought which the home lot shows. She disclaims
great credit, for she says, "One has only to live with a place to find
out what it needs."
As I look back to the beginning of my experiment, I see only one bit of
good luck that attended it. Building material was cheap during the
months in which I had to build so much. Nothing else specially favored
me, while in one respect my experiment was poorly timed. The price of
pork was unusually low. For three years, from 1896, the price of hogs
never reached $5 per hundred pounds in our market,--a thing
unprecedented for thirty years. I never sold below three and a half
cents, but the showing would have been wonderfully bettered could I have
added another cent or two per pound for all the pork I fattened. The
average price for the past twenty-five years is well above five cents a
pound for choice lots. Corn and all other foods were also cheap; but
this made little difference with me, because I was not a seller of
grain.
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