Page:Adventures in Thrift (1916).djvu/213

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fresh vegetables to stale ones. The potatoes we raised cost us seventeen cents a bushel, when our neighbors were paying the village grocer from one dollar and fifty cents to two dollars a bushel. Corn that cost us from eight to ten cents a dozen ears in our garden cost our neighbors thirty cents in the stores. Our two acres, worked almost entirely by my wife and an occasional helper, with what assistance I could give outside my office hours, cut down our cost of living more than half. Any family in a small town can do the same, but the city housekeeper is up against a different proposition, and we found that out when we took hold of this demonstration farm.

"We were here for a definite purpose—to prove that Long Island men could raise garden stuff to market in Greater New York, and that men who bought Long Island land could run truck farms at a good profit. The first part of the proposition was easy enough. The first year we raised more than three hundred varieties of vegetables, herbs and fruits.

"The second half of the proposition was not so easily solved. When we shipped out produce