ovah the rivah we had a lot of mulberry trees—300 to 400 mammoth big ones. We had fully 200 hawgs, but we had to send fer the neighbors' hawgs to help out and to keep the mulberries from smellin'."
Where the captain then lived he had a bunch of thirty-five hogs of various sizes running in mulberry and persimmon pasture, all of which I saw. He estimated that one-third of their weight, or one thousand pounds of pork, live weight, was due to the mulberries from eighty trees set twenty-four by thirty-three feet. That runs out about six hundred and twenty-five pounds of pork, live weight, to an acre of rather thin, sandy land with little care and no cultivation. A big yarn, you say? I'll willingly take it back just as soon as any experiment station makes a real test and disproves it.
The trouble is that no station, so far as I can find out, is in a position to disprove it,"[1] because none of them has any
- ↑ The attempt to secure scientifically determined facts from southern stations brought nothing but much favorable opinion and a suggestion that something might have been done at Tuskegee Institute. Dr. G. W. Carver,
food, and in the main bearing season the two hundred and fifty trees would carry twice the number of hogs. Nearly every farmer has a small orchard in this section, eastern Carolina. I regard the mulberry for hog food with much favor."
"I wouldn't take a pretty for my mulberry orchard," said one of these Carolinians. "It's funny to me to see how soon a hawg kin learn that wind blows down the mulberries. Soon as the wind starts up, Mr. Hawg strikes a trot out of the woods fer the mulberry grove. Turn yer pigs into mulberries and they shed off and slick up nice. It puts 'em in fine shape—conditions 'em like turnin' 'em in on wheat. They eats mulberries and goes down to the branch and cools off, and comes back and eats more—don't need any grain in mulberry time."
"They begin to beah right away." one Carolina farmer declared. "Why, I've seen 'em beah in the nursery row, and they begin to beah some as soon as they get any growth at all."
I have myself seen wild ones bearing in the Virginia woods when only five feet high. As to their hardiness, another Carolina mulberry grower testified as follows: "Yeh can't kill the things. Yeh kin plant yeh mulberries jest like yeh would cane—cut it off in joints and graft from the one yeh want to. I moved a tree last yeah. Jest put a man cuttin' roots off— and he cut 'em scandalous—and I hooked two mules to it and hauled it ovah heah. I didn't 'spect it would live, but it did." ("A Georgia Tree Farmer," J. Russell Smith. The Country Gentleman, December 4, 1915, pp. 1921-22.)
