■6o AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



the physical condition of the soil. It acts as a sponge to hold 

 the moisture. Humus is also obtained from the barn cellar 

 manures. One of the principal ofhces of humus is to put the 

 soil in a condition so that the bacteria can act upon it. There 

 are immense numbers of these bacteria in the soil and they cannot 

 do their work except when the soil is made fine. If you neglect 

 to incorporate vegetable matter in your soils you will find that 

 in a very little while the soil will cease to respond. On the 

 mountain where I live the farmers began to plant potatoes on 

 commercial fertilizer. They used half a ton of a mixed ferti- 

 lizer, 4-8-10. The next year they used 1500 pounds to get a 

 good crop and the next year 2,000 pounds, and did not get as 

 good a crop, and the next year they did not get any crop at all. 

 They had used up the supply of humus. It is said that out in 

 Dakota and Minnesota there are American farmers who have 

 grown wheat 30 years on the same soil until they cannot pro- 

 duce a crop, and I hear they are going over into Canada. If 

 the people in the West had only known that humus is the key to 

 fertility how much better it would have been. I fancy they are 

 going to rob Canada West of its fertility. The fertility of the 

 soil is in the humus and in the bacterial life and if you gentle- 

 men who have undertaken to grow orchards in the State of 

 Maine do not pay more attention to this humus you are going 

 to fail. If you do not sow a cover crop on your orchard you had 

 better begin. You are taking a crop out of the soil every year 

 in the form of apples. You may be generous enough to put 

 back commercial fertilizers, but those alone will not do. Do 

 not expect to get good returns from commercial fertilizer with- 

 out cultivation and without the humus in the soil. There are 

 two classes of plants, as you have heard many times, that pro- 

 vide humus and provide something else. Clover is charged with 

 nitrogen. Some 25 years ago it was discovered in Germany 

 that tiny nodules on the roots of the clover are not a diseased 

 condition but they are the home of the bacteria peculiar to the 

 clover plant, taking out of the air the nitrogen that is in it and 

 storing it in the clover plant. The same is true of the vetch. 

 The seeds of the summer vetch are almost as large as a sweet 

 pea. If you sow that cover crop about the first of July, the land 

 is damp and it comes right up and in our orchards before the 

 apples are picked we get a cover crop two or three feet high. 



