SUBSOIL CULTURE. 



BY JOHN MACDONALD — PRESIDENT WASHINGTON COUNTY AGRICUL- 

 TURAL SOCIETY. 



The site of Salem, as all will remember, who have visited that 

 pretty village, is the eastern . extreme of a plain that extends some 

 two miles south and west, with very gentle undulations of surface, 

 and may embrace near 3,000 acres. This plain is surrounded by 

 hills, and constitutes the bottom of a very picturesque, natural basin, 

 that geologists conjecture was once filled with water by Black Creek, 

 from the north, and the Battenkill from the east, and was finally 

 drained through a gap in the hills, by which the " Kill " flows west- 

 ward to the Hudson. 



Not far from the center of this basin, lies my farm — the surface 

 rolling — the more elevated portions, gravel — and the low glades, 

 loam — all resting on clay at different depths — approaching the surface, 

 however, only in the loam. For 30 years prior to 1834, it was oc- 

 cupied by two industrious tenants, who taxed its productive powers 

 to their utmost capacity — sowing wheat while wheat would grow, and 

 then covering it with rye, year after year. 



I found the farm so exhausted that it was exceedingly difficult to 

 make grass seed catch without manure — and no wonder — for it did 

 seem as if the gravel soil in some of the easiest tilled, and therefore 

 the most exhausted fields, had been leached^ and little beside clean 

 sand and gravel left. (The course of husbandry adopted, and by 

 which I enjoy both the pleasure and the profit of seeing these gravel 

 fields giving fair promise of returning fertility, may, perhaps, be the 

 subject of a future communication.) The loam too, seemed much 

 impoverished by constant tillage and successive annual cropping — 

 but the mere exhaustion of the soil was not the worst of it ; for in 



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