A NUT TO CRACK. 87 



been ploughed the year previous. Now, all these things 

 I have thought of, and I have told them to my brother farm- 

 ers, and I believe a great many of them are going to try the 

 experiment. Now, if that has been tried and found want- 

 ing, I want to go back and right it. 



Mr. Cheever (of Sheldon ville). I never fear to put ma- 

 nure on the top of the ground in the fall or winter, or any 

 time of year. I have frequently put manure on grass-land 

 covered with snow in winter, and on frozen ground when 

 there was no snow; and, not finishing the whole field in win- 

 ter, I have completed the work in the spring, with the same 

 kind of manure, and I have never been able to see any prac- 

 tical difference in the amount of crop grown on that portion 

 manured in the winter and that portion finished up in the 

 spring. But ^lat I was going to state is a fact without 

 any theory : I leave that to you. Last winter I top-dressed 

 a grass-field heavily on the snow. Across that field was a 

 low depression ; and the wash from above, caused by the 

 melting snows, was turned into one channel and swept over 

 a piece tliree rods wide. After the manure had been spread, 

 and partly incorporated with the snow, there came on just 

 such a thaw as I do not like to see after I have got manure 

 spread. The snow went off in twenty-four hours ; and the 

 accumulated wash from the field above, that had not been 

 top-dressed, pure snow-water, came down across this field, 

 and actually washed the manure off clean for two or three 

 rods across that field ; and, when I went to look at it, my 

 manure was not there ; it had washed down into the meadow 

 below. The meadow was flooded, and the water was colored, 

 and smelt like water from a barnyard. In mowing this sum- 

 mer, the grass was quite as good where the manure was all 

 washed off as it was anywhere else. That is the nut I 

 want somebody to crack. 



Dr. Wakefield. I don't belong to that class of mules 

 that will not eat at either stack ; but I go to one stack, and, 

 if I don't like that, I go to the other. I recollect the dis- 

 cussion a year ago, and I gave there my experience. I used 

 to be afraid to put my manure on top of the ground (I was 

 afraid of evaporation, I was afraid of leaching) : I wanted 

 to wait until the time came for the plant to grow, when 

 every thing conspired .with Nature to send it forward imme- 



