Harvey Greenleaf had luck, and has what our people know as “gumption,” and “git-up-and-git,” and Mrs. Greenleaf, a fair, ample person, is a born woman of business. Once a neighbor, a farm hand, who had been discharged for slackness, planted buckwheat in a small clearing next the Greenleafs’, out of spite. (Buckwheat honey is unmarketable, because of its marked peculiar flavor, and its dark color.) Harvey was away at the County Grange Meeting—he was Master of his Grange that year—at the time it flowered. Two little girls, out picking wild raspberries, brought word of the trouble.
“Mis’ Greenleaf! Mis’ Greenleaf! There’s buckwheat in blow at Jasper Derry’s clearing, an’ it’s full of your bees!”
Mrs. Greenleaf harnessed up the old white mare herself, and drove over to the offender’s house. No one knows how she dealt with him, but the buckwheat was cut before night. Harvey chuckles, and says she swung the scythe herself. Not much harm was done, and only a little of the yield turned out to have been injured by the buckwheat.
There are no rules about the planting of buckwheat near bee-hives. It is a matter of good feeling and neighborliness, and buckwheat is seldom grown where a neighbor keeps bees for profit; but it is impossible to guard against the trouble entirely and I have known a whole season’s yield to be discolored with honey brought from buckwheat, nine miles from the hives.
One early morning this June, as we were at breakfast on the piazza, a boy came round the corner of the house, and asked if we wanted “a quart of wild strawberries, a pint of cream, and a dozen of Mother’s fresh rolls, for forty cents!” We certainly did; and in the driveway we saw “Mother” waiting in the wagon, an alert-looking woman with a friendly face. She told us that she was Harvey Greenleaf’s daughter-in-law, and the boy her eldest son.
“I think there’s lots of small extra business that folks can do on the farms, if they’re spry, that sets things ahead a lot,” she said, _à propos_ of the strawberries.
The rolls were as light as feather, and the cream very thick. We arranged for the same bargain twice a week while the berry season lasted!
In the autumn the same couple came again, this time with vegetables and fruit, nicely arranged, and with small cakes of fresh cream cheese done up in waxed paper in neat packages, each package stamped with S. Greenleaf, Eagle Cliff Farm. This is a new venture in our part of the country.