210 Bulletin 191. 



to plant six inches deep, the land should be plowed eight or ten 

 inches deep. 



Then again land that has never been plowed deeper than live or 

 six inches should not tlie next time be plowed teiL The deepening 

 process should be gradual — an inch or so a year. More 'Miew 

 dirt" may safely be turned up in autumn than in spring. 



Some fear that deep planting will make the harvesting more diffi- 

 cult; if coupled with the deep planting the cultivation of the crop 

 is continued late in the season, the mellowness of the soil and the 

 freedom from late summer w^eeds compensate for the tubers lying a 

 little deeper in the soil. 



Again, some claim that if they do not " hill up" the plants many 

 tubers will be damaged by exposure to the sun. If however the 

 land has been deeply and thoroughly prepared and the planting is 

 sufficiently deep so that there is plenty of room in the mellow soil 

 for the tubers to develop beneath the surface there will be few 

 "sunburns;" but if the fitting and planting are shallow, hilling is 

 necessary to protect the tubers. 



There is some complaint that the diggers in common use in the 

 potato growing sections of the State do not do good work in level 

 tilled fields. They are so constructed that the wheels need to be 

 let down into the furrows between the rows in order that the digger 

 may get well under the hills. This is a fault of construction that 

 will be corrected by the manufacturers as soon as level tillage 

 becomes general, and if in order to use the machines now on hand 

 shovel plowing is necessary, it is better to do it at harvest time, just 

 ahead of the digger. 



JS^ow a word about experiments in general. It seems wise to dis- 

 tinguish between a " trial " and an " experiment." A farmer is 

 convinced that it is well to spray potatoes with Bordeaux mixture. 

 lie takes the necessary steps to that end and sprays his crop. lie 

 makes a trial of spraying. He may " think " that the spraying was 

 a bene tit. Another farmer sprays a part of a field and leaves another 

 part unsprayed for comparison. He harvests a measured area from 

 each portion of the field and measures ov weighs the product. He 

 "knows" whether the spraying increased the crop and if he kept 

 account of time and material consumed, he "knows" whether it 



