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It is customary on many farms where it is not desired to grow pop corn as a market crop to plant a few rows of it in the garden for home use. This phase of farming usually interests the children and it is well to let them do the planting. Pop corn readily mixes with field corn and sweet corn planted near it, and as this mixing renders it unsuitable for seed purposes some of the old seed should be saved for next year's planting or good seed should be procured from some other source.
FIG. 2.-A high-school principal and his plat of pop corn. If it is desired to grow pop corn as a field crop, the surplus stock that is not wanted for home use can usually be sold to local merchants at a fair price, or a profitable local trade may be built up by supplying it direct to consumers. Both of these methods should enable consumers to get a first-class article at a lower price than it would cost on the general market. This practice is to be encouraged, as it enables consumers to make their own pop-corn confections and thus have them fresh, in which state they are at their best, and when it is considered that $30 worth of popped corn in the form of 5-cent packages represents an outlay of only about $1 or $1.50 for raw material the economy of this practice is evident. Sufficient pop corn to make $30 worth of 5-cent packages of popped corn can be grown on a piece of land 40 feet long and 20 feet wide. See figures 1, 2, 3, and 4 for methods of planting pop corn in fields and gardens.
