Girls club, tomato club booklet by Mariam Carter

[image of sliced open tomato and knife]

Mariam Carter

I am a little girl twelve years old, I live in the southeastern part of the County, right near the Duplin line; our school-house is about two miles away. Last winter while in school Mrs. W. B. Lamb, one of the Consultant house-keepers and the Colaborator Miss Lula Cassidy visited our school and talked to us about club work. We sometime after that organized a canning club, and I came home from school one after-noon and made my hotbed for planting tomatoes. We made it on the south side of a building, dug down about 18 inches the size we wanted the bed then threw in the manure and packed it down to allmost near level of ground and a few inches on top of garden loam. Then sowed the Stone tomato seed, they came up and grew We hardened plants off by removing cover from off them on mild days; I set out [?] 1/10 acre; the plants lived and made beautifull bushes and the fruit was very plentifull but it would rot before it ripened then the worms

long green worms, would get on the tomatoes as I am [image of tomato with a green worm eating into it] showing in this picture and eat big holes in it. They all so ate the leaves, I tried to keep the worms off by picking them off in the morning and afternooon but they still keep ahead of me and got my fruit; we did not spray and this year, but I sprinkled the plants with sulphur. And some of my plants took that dreadfull wilt disease. My tomato crop was a complete failure, but we then went to canning other garden vegatables such as butter beans, string beans, peas, squash and all so different kinds of

fruit.

One day while the club was meeting about 2 miles away from my home with one of the club members in the afternoon there came a terrible cloud, it rained and rained, some of our cans of stuff were exhausting and were ready to tip and some we had not sealed, we went to working very fast and the work being new to us and the rain falling so we failed to get some of our cans sealed good and some of our vegetables spoiled. It keep raining so the whole crowd had to spend the night with this same club member, one woman had left her baby at home and was very anxious about it, but the bridge was gone so she could not get home that night with out going about four miles around another way.

but we have now learned to seal better and understand the work better, and we like it more and more, even if we did not make much progress this year we expect to be a club member next year and hope and believe we will have better success.