By J.R. Sams, County Agent
Perhaps you don’t all know that Miss Irene Flentye near the old Mimosa hotel site close by Lynn, N.C., is becoming quite a farmer, or farmeress as the case may be. Her farm is not as extensive as some Polk county farmers, having as I mistake not, about the sum of two acres all told, wood land and that in cultivation. But the beauty of her farming operations is that she is doing a little of almost everything that is going on over the earth. She has bees, poultry, grape vines coming on, apple trees, peach trees, cherry and plum trees and I don’t know what else. She also has strawberries, and by the way she got “pouty” with me because Mrs. Smith of Columbus gave me a sauce of strawberries and cream two weeks before she had them. It was no fault of mine. Mrs. Smith planted hers on a southern slope and Miss Flenty has hers facing the north and it was nature that made the difference. She also has a nice garden with all kinds of vegetables, onions and lettuce seemed to be a specialty. And I got another good joke on Miss Flentye. She is very enthusiastic about everything she undertakes and especially her Rhode Island chickens. If you remember sometime ago I paid her farm a visit and on my rounds I was inspecting her pen of red roosters and found an egg in a nest in the corner of the house. This time while investigating I found a rooster in a trap nest, and I asked her what on earth that rooster was doing in a trap nest and she replied, “I want to find out which rooster lays that I may put a band on his leg. Now she may succeed in developing a dual purpose strain of rooster, but I suspect that when a rooster is hatched out, he will continue to be a rooster in spite of all the trip nests and other contraptions that will ever e invented. Now laying all jokes aside; if every farmer in Polk county was as dead in earnest about their farm work and as determined as Miss Flentye is to seek information, then put that information to practice, farming and improved home life in Polk and other Piedmont counties would go forward by long leaps and bounds. And why not every farmer and every other business man continue to be a student? Why should any man quit learning? There has never been more progressive times than now, and times are not going to be less progressive.
The young man or the middle aged and old man that is willing to think and back up his thinking by good honest work will be the man of the times. The coming times as well as the present and the past. Yes, many farmers who think they know more than is in the books would do well to visit Miss Flenty’s two acre farm and just see how many questions she would ask you, and by the time you correctly answer all of her questions, you will be a much wiser man than before you went. Suppose you try it.
NOTICE
The Polk County Agricultural Board will meet in the court house at Columbus on Monday June 6th, at 11 o’clock a.m.
Every member is expected to be present, and the Editor of the Polk County News is requested to be present. This may be the last meeting of the year.
From the front page of the Polk County News, Tryon, N.C., June 3, 1921. Miss Flenty’s name was also spelled Flentye in the article. I don’t know which is correct.
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