17() REPORT OF STATE BOARD OF HORTICULTURE. 



years. At a rough estimate, it requires the expenditure of that sum to put 

 that lot into the best pasture grasses. 



Thirty years ago the writer, desiring better grass land than his donation 

 claim, purchased a body of alluvial soil adjoining Salem. It had been talcen 

 as a donation claim in 1850, and its wealth of timber growth taken oft' for 

 lumber and cordwood duising twenty years. In that period it passed through 

 seven different ownerships, yet was under mortgage for its full value at the 

 time of my purchase. Less than three acres of it was clear enough for the 

 more profitable use of potato growing. Laying between the low-water mark 

 of the Willamette Kiver and twenty-five feet above that, nothing but con- 

 stant use for richest field crops will prevent nature from covering it with 

 trees and brush woods, — for water is the nursing mother of trees. After 

 twenty years cutting of sawlogs and cordwood there was still mature ash 

 and balm timber unculled. Taking the market price, $33 was received for 

 mature ash logs and $130 for balm or water poplar for paper pulp. This $163 

 would not have paid for clearing the land of stumps and brush woods: im- 

 mediately the fire, axe, and grubbing-hoe, grass seed, cattle, and sheep were 

 freely used to kill the unpi-ofitable undergrowth of blackberry and salmon 

 berry. It was found that the immense balm trees too large for jjaper pulp 

 log contractors to handle while alive, and acting as pumps in taking the 

 moisture from the soil lower than the roots of cultivated crops would reach, 

 rendered even the culture of potatoes profitless within the radius of their 

 live roots, and such trees have been either cvit and floated ott' on winter floods 

 or girded, dried, and burned as they stood. On land yet incumbered with 

 these large stumps, four hundred bushels of potatoes per acre was harvested 

 in 1899, and from thirteen acres, two thousand sacks have been taken this 

 season of 1900. 



On the lowest land producing trees field crops ai-e rendered unprofitable 

 by live tree roots taking the soil moisture — these l<;illed — and corn, white, 

 red, and alsike clover, blue and perennial rye grass, redtop and barnyard 

 millet, grow down to the lowest plowable land. 



On the highest of this land from low-water mark suitable for intensified 

 farming with any crops of fruits, grasses, or grains are grown. Twenty-two 

 and one-half acres in hops have aggregated a cash return for the past four 

 seasons, 1897 to 1900, inclusive, of $12,050.26. These results are not cited be- 

 cause they are any way near what more thought, more labor, and skill in 

 culture can produce ; but as a means of illustrating the proportion of family 

 life sustainable from twenty-two and one-half acres of this land as compared 

 with the value of its product as natural forest, — believing as I do that in all 

 probability $12,000 is as much as wood product of the entire tract of two 

 hundred and fifteen acres has returned to its owners in the twenty years 

 preceding the present ownership — as much as it would sell for today in paper 

 pull) material if it stood as the untouched forest growth for one hundred 

 years. I do not mean by this to advise neglect of timber culture. Fai- 

 from it. I am a lover of trees. 



