1914, girls club, tomato club booklet by Adelia Kendrick

1914

[image of a red tomato with green leaves in a yellow bowl]

Adelia Kendrick

Fallston.

N.C.

[image of a green question mark]

First Year

The object of the Girls Canning Work is to encourage farm girls to can the surplus products of the orchard and garden and to can it better. The girls can also earn a little money and get an education at the same time.

I joined the canning club that I might earn some easy money and to learn to can vegetables and fruits in the best way possible. I have found it not so easy but very interesting. It teaches us to increas the yield and to can purer food.

My tenth acre garden is a swampy newgound with a leaf-mold top soil and a blue clay sub-soil. The soil is very loose. The roots held it apart and caused it to dry out more than it other wise would. I selected it because the soil is very rich and it was far enough from the house that the chickens would not find it. My garden is near an old wet-weather lake. The land was plowed five in. deep with a bulltongue. The roots that were broken while plowing were burned. The rows were laid off

and bedded as for cotton.

I sowed Stone tomato seed april the twenty third Thy didn't come up. I got some plants of the early kind and set out two rows may the sixteenth. They all lived but one or two. I sowed more Stone tomato seed may the twenty-third. They come up fine. When I began setting them it was dry and I planted and replanted and still the tenth acre was not one third covered. At last I got a fairly good stand. The ground had never been worked before. It had very little grass. I hoed the dirt up around the plants and cut the sprouts from the stumps. The plants grew nicely. no insects bothered them. Two wilted and died. I think moles must have cut the roots. My two rows of early tomatoes begun ripening the twentysecond of july. I used the first on the table. I begun canning them the thirteth of July. I canned 66 qts in glass of early tomatoes for home use. There is no market here for fresh tomatoes.

Some of the cans spoiled. It was the first time I had ever canned any. Some of mama's cans spoiled. I tried to find the cause. The leaves of the plants were brown spotted and turned yellow and droped off. The top of the tomato looked like it had been water soaked. I decided they were diseased and quit canning. I begun canning my Stone tomatoes the second week in aug. I had canned 121 cans of Stone tomatoes when the leaves turned brown and droped off like the early ones. The tomatoes ripened up seeminly fine, red up to the stem, but when peeled most of them were yellow one fourth to one in. around the stem.

Our school opened the 24 of aug. So I had to can most of my stone tomatoes after school. I gathered most of them in the morning while the dew was on the canned them after school, Some of the people around here said that