The 100-acre farmer will ordinarily have 60 acres in crop yearly, which will average him $20 per acre. The balance of his farm is in hay, pasture, and forest.
Now, from this 60 acres of crop he nicely supports his family, and yearly puts by a nice little sum to buy lands for his growing boys when they shall need them; of course, he cannot save the whole $1,200 obtained for his crops, as his family must be maintained out of this as well as pay for repairs and improvements. However, most Canadian farmers’ wives supplement this grain product by the butter and cheese from the cows running upon the pastures.
Indeed, the wife’s help is a very great element to the farmer’s success, as regards saving money; and she deserves her place of importance beside her husband. Our Ontario farmer drives a good team upon the roads, encased in first-class harness, and a smart light spring buggy behind them. Rope traces and straw collars, which one sees in the South, would be beneath his dignity, and one must search Ontario over and over to find an example of such. And he is well clad in clothes, the product of the factory loom. Only a few years back he wore clothes made from home-grown wool spun by his good wife and woven upon some loom near at home. But latterly the factories have produced tweeds and fullcloths at so small a price that it has not paid him to work up his own wool. His table is well supplied with not only an abundance of food, but in great variety, fruit in various forms forming a feature at almost every meal. The universal meat diet of England is not acceptable to his palate nor suitable for our climate, for our systems require a laxative in this climate, which fruit gives him. His wife is more than the equal in cooking of her friends in Old England. She can compound more dishes out of the same material, make more tasteful and toothsome pastry than one can buy in a pastrycook’s shop in Europe. She does not consider it beneath her dignity assisting in milking the cows, teaching calves which are to be reared to drink milk, or possibly feeding the pigs if the men be busy.
As a transformation she can, after a wash, quickly don garments fit for the parlor, and entertain company at her board with an ease and heartiness truly surprising to European travellers who visit us. Even if not able to converse in half Frenchy English, many of them can dash off a number of tunes upon an organ or piano in a manner acceptable to most persons not musical critics. An organ is in most good farm-houses, and sometimes a piano, and the daughters are daily becoming proficient on them, practising after the evening milking is done.