217. Unused of the Coast Plain was settled very early, but strange to say, much of it is still unsettled. If you walk inland from Tuckerton, north of Atlantic City, you will not pass a house or a field in seventeen miles. You will see only woods, where the big trees have been cut for lum ber, and the little ones have been badly injured by forest fires. Much of eastern New Jersey and other parts of the Plain are still a great forest. Why is this land empty of people when it is so near the sea, and when parts of it were first settled so long ago? The answer is given in two words: poor soil.
Sandy soil is generally poor soil for grass and grain crops. Farmers who cut down the forests and tried to raise wheat, corn, and grass on the Coastal Plain, found that the crops were too poor to pay them for the work. For better land they went to the westward, leaving many of the Coastal Plain farms to be overgrown again with pine trees.
218. Truck farming on sandy soil.—Four new things have recently changed farming conditions in the Coastal Plain: (a) Big cities which need more vegetables; (b) express trains to take produce to these cities; (c) canneries for preserving food; (d) com mercial fertilizers to make sandy land productive.
Soil so sandy that it will not produce good grass may be made good for peas, cabbages, strawberries, watermelons, and other garden crops. We learned in Sections 25 and 39 how people in the Cotton Belt and Florida have learned to growgood truck crops on sandysoil by using commercial fertilizer and by planting legumes. The people in the North Atlantic Coast Plain follow the same method. Sandy fields which in 1875 were not worth keeping for wheatfields were allowed to grow up into forests of pine and chestnut. They have since been cleared again, and are producing splendid crops of melons, vegetables, and small fruit and sometimes corn.
219. Marshes and cranberries.—Parts of the coast plain are called saltwater marsh, because they are under water at high tide but are left dry at low tide. This marsh is covered with coarse grass. Other parts of the plain are so level as to be swampy near the streams, and there the cranberry —a little, low vine—grows wild. Many farmers grow cranberries on Cape Cod and in New Jersey. In order to keep down the weeds, they build dams so that they can flood the cranberry bogs for a part of the season; then they let the water off at picking time. The fields are again flooded in cold
weather to keep the plants from freezing.
220. The journey of the harvest-time. We saw in Section 25 that harvest-time travels northward through Florida and the Cotton Belt. It travels in the same way from North Carolina to Maine. At Norfolk, in the month of May, the boats and trains daily carry away thousands of barrels of new potatoes and thousands of crates of straw berries. About the end of May, the harvest crosses the mouth of the Chesapeake. Then the southern counties of Virginia are busy sending their potatoes north, south, east, and west, as far as Maine, Louisiana, and Michigan. At that time no other place in the East is harvesting many new potatoes. Harvest-time then moves northward into Maryland, and successively on into Dela ware, New Jersey, and Long Island. The strawberry harvest crosses the Chesapeake one month ahead of the potato harvest.
During the summer, hundreds of city families move to the country, where they camp in little houses built for the purpose, and work on the truck farms. Men and women, boys and girls, spend several weeks picking strawberries, peas, beans, raspberries, blackberries, and other crops, as one after the other the crops ripen for the market.
221. Getting the produce to market.—On a road that leads to Philadelphia or New York, one may see in a single day hundreds of auto-trucks loaded with produce rumbling toward town. At scores of railroad stations, freight cars are being loaded for distant places. Steamboats loaded to the limit go up and down the rivers and bays carrying garden truck to the cities. Sometimes there are not enough carriers to haul the produce. Sometimes so much produce is raised that it cannot all be sold in the cities. Then heaps of good things may spoil upon the wharves.
222. Canning factories.—At nearly every little town in the trucking section there are canning factories, where food is saved for distant peoples to eat at future times. In these frame buildings hundreds of women and girls work early and late to can the food, so that it will keep for months and may be easily carried to all parts of the country and to foreign lands. So many boat lines carry fruits and vegetables to Baltimore that this city is the greatest canning center in the world.