REPORT OF FIELD EXPERIMENTS. ' 93 



ably high, and a great part of this came in one shower, when 2 

 inches fell in the extraordinarily short period of 2£ hours. This, 

 it seems far from improbable, washed a good deal of the nitrate 

 of soda, which is not held by the soil like ammonia salts, away, 

 and will in great measure account for the inferiority of its 

 results. 



EXPERIMENTS ON PERMANENT PASTURE. 



The permanent grass of the farm, till within the last few years, 

 when the present owner bought it, did not yield a crop of hay 

 worth harvesting. Since then, by dint of mole-draining, ap- 

 plication of artificial manures, and feeding off sheep with artificial 

 food, he has brought it to yield crops of grass and hay of the 

 best quality. The part chosen for the experiments was a piece 

 of very even quality, though by no means as productive as a 

 large portion of the field. Sheep had been folded on it with 

 artificial food the previous year, and for three successive years 

 before that had received a dressing of salt, guano, and super- 

 phosphate, at the rate of 26s. per acre. The field chosen was tile 

 drained 9 yards apart, about 20 years since, by a previous occu- 

 pier, and is dry. The dressings were applied on May 5th. They 

 were all tried in quadruplicate, in plots the sVth of an acre, and 

 in sowing the dressings care was taken not to sow within 3 

 inches of the wires, so as to prevent any error from the influence 

 of the dressing spreading beyond its own plot. The grass at the 

 time was, in that part of the field, not more than 3 inches high. 

 The weather was rather dry for some days after the application, 

 and for ten days the grass on some of the plots was slightly 

 scorched, especially on the sulphate of ammonia and chloride of 

 potassium plots. 



On May 26th the plots appeared in the following order : — 1st, 

 Nitrate of soda with sulphate of ammonia. 2d, Nitrate of soda. 

 3d, Peruvian guano. 4th, Sulphate of ammonia. 5th, Super- 

 phosphate, with chloride of potassium and sulphate of ammonia. 

 6th, Nothing. 7th, Chloride of potassium ; with this the land 

 seemed dried up. 



In using chloride potassium it was thought that it might 

 have the effect of increasing the growth of clover. This, how- 

 ever, does not appear to have been the case when applied alone, 

 though the mixture of the bone-ash with sulphate ammonia and 

 chloride potassium seemed rather to have increased it, as well as 

 to have thickened the bottom grass. The guano did this in a 

 marked degree. The grass was cut and made into hay the last 

 week in June, and weighed as hay on the 29th. The weights 

 per plot are given in Table IV., which shows also the disposition 

 of the plots. The period between the first and second cutting- 

 was not at all suitable for the production of a large second crop. 



