Other crops did almost as well in proportion. He had put in no late potatoes; but in September he harvested the balance of his early crop and, as they were a good keeping variety, he knew there would be enough to keep the family supplied until the next season.
Of other roots, including a patch of well-grown mangels for Mrs. Atterson's handsome flock of chickens, there were plenty to carry the family over the winter.
As the frosts became harder Hiram dug his root pits in the high, light soil of the garden, drew pinetags to cover them, and, gradually, as the winter advanced, heaped the earth over the various piles of roots to keep them through the winter.
Meanwhile, in September, corn harvest had come on. The four acres Hiram had planted below the stables yielded a fair crop, that part of the land he had been able to enrich with coarse manure showing a much better average than the remainder.
The four acres yielded them something over one hundred and sixty baskets of sound corn which, as corn was then selling for fifty cents per bushel, meant that the crop was worth about forty dollars.
As near as Hiram could figure it had cost about fifteen dollars to raise the crop; therefore the profit to Mrs. Atterson was some twenty-five dollars.
Besides the profit from some of the garden crops, this was very small indeed; as Hiram said, it did not pay well enough to plant small patches of corn for them to fool with it much.
“The only way to make a good profit out of corn corn a place like this,” he said to Henry, who would not be convinced, “is to have a big drove of hogs and turn them into the field to fatten on the standing corn.”
“But that would be wasteful!” cried Henry, shocked at the suggestion.
“Big pork producers do not find it so,” returned Hiram, confidently. “Or else one wants a drove of cattle to fatten, and cuts the corn green and shreds it, blowing it into a silo.
“The idea is to get the cost of the corn crop back through the price paid by the butcher for your stock, or hogs.”
“Nobody ever did that around here,” declared young Pollock.
“And that's why nobody gets ahead very fast around here. Henry, why don't you strike out and do something new--just to surprise 'em?
“Stop selling a little tad of this, and a little tad of that off the farm and stick to the good farmer's rule: 'Never sell anything off the place that can't walk off.'”