Mow Those Weeds

1916

Have you mowed those weeds? Then your farm is worth more and you are a better neighbor and a better citizen than if you hadn't. Everyone thinks more of the farmer and farm if he sees the weeds neatly mowed as he drives along a well-dragged road. As he passes the end of the line fence, he sees a fence row, not a weed row, and the same is true of the cross fence.

Does this describe your farm? Then rabbit shooting may not be so good on it next winter, but buyers will offer you more an acre on it because they know it will take less work to make crops on it for a number of years than if all that weed seed had not been harvested. If you still have that weed crop to harvest, you will have to hurry. Weed seed is getting nearer ripe every day. The hot, dry weather has hurried ripening instead of belating it. Burr-pulling time is coming, and the horse weeds in the fence rows are getting harder for the mower or scythe to handle, but there is some consolation in the thought that there is still time to do a great deal of good, and that too early mowing might have let the weeds come up and make another crop of seed. — Exchange.

Roads Must be Cared For

1916

Remember the admonition of the President of the United States: If you want to keep a black post white, you must keep on painting it white. If you don't it will get black again and finally it will rot all the way through and perish of neglect. If you want to keep good roads good, you must maintain them, else they will speedily become bad roads, and all the money and effort and engineering skill expended in their construction will be wasted; worse than wasted, because the man who has a good thing and doesn't know it, sins against the light.

In this world, no sooner is a thing done than it has to be done over again. Good roads begin to wear out as soon as they are built, good clothes begin to wear out as soon as they are worn, no sooner is a man elected to Congress, if he be a provident and forward-looking man and likes this sort of work, than he must begin to build his fences for the next election two years hence. Everything wears out, even "favorite sons" — moth and rust corrupt, and in some parts of the country thieves break through and steal — and there is nothing that wears faster than a public road which has been built at great cost and is left to take care of itself. It won't do it. If it is used by the people for whose benefit it was constructed, it will wear away; if it is not used by anybody, the elements — wind, rain storm and sunshine — will destroy it in time.