612 



GARDEyERS' CHROMCLE 



Soils and How to Improve Them 



D. L. MACKINTOSH 



o 



F all the things that the great Creator has given 

 man dominion over, there is nothing so generous, 

 so truthful, as old mother-earth. If you treat her 

 well, she will repay you manifold, while on the other 

 hand, if you neglect her and try to gain something for 

 nothing, she will go back on you, and you have no 

 redress. 



Of course, you know that all soils are made out of 

 rock to begin with. The knowledge, however, accurate 

 and comprehensive, of the geological features of any 

 particular locality will not enable me to predicate with 

 certainty, the nattire, composition and productiveness of 

 its soil. So many circumstances of locality come into 

 operation tending to alter the composition of the soil, and 

 although we kncnv. that, as a rule, a sandstone formation 

 will give a sandy soil and a limestone formation a calca- 

 reous soil, we cannot be so sure of the exact nature of 

 these soils. The position of the strata and the mixing of 

 the detritus of these, the action of water upon soil and 

 its shifting from one locality to another, as from a posi- 

 tion on the hillside to one in the valley, will tend to 

 introduce elements of different kinds, so that the soil 

 from a sandstone formation, for instance, in one locality 

 may be very different in its texture and productiveness 

 from that of sandstone formation in another locality. Nor 

 is distance of one locality from another an essential 

 requirement in bringing about the diversity of soils. Very 

 often it is found that the soil of one part of the farm 

 gives no index to the nature of the soil in the other part. 

 Indeed the difference may, and often does, appear in the 

 small space of a few acres. 



If you have about twenty acres of garden in one place, 

 you may find in that twenty acres, five different kinds of 

 soil. It would take more time and space than I have to 

 spare to give the reason why. One lesson to be learned 

 from the diversity of soil is that there must be diversity 

 of manure and crops, and that is often one reason why 

 Mr. Jones can grow certain things better than I\Ir. 

 Thomas. Another thing, the season has something more 

 to do with a man's success or failure, as the case may be. 

 A test was- made of the power of the soil to produce 

 crops without manure as a means of judging the effect 

 of atmospheric influence alone, and it was found that the 

 lowest weight of the bushel and the greatest amount of 

 straw corresponded with the season in which there was 

 the lowest Summer heat, and the greatest number of rainy 

 days, and the reverse as the case when the weather was 

 the other way. 



Soils are very much what you make them. Some years 

 ago I took all the top soil off an acre of land. The first 

 twelve inches I used for making a flower garden. To get 

 the grade I wanted, I had to take three feet oft" in some 

 places, and then I was left with Boulder Clay, where 

 hardly anything would grow. If I had covered that acre 

 with six inches of good soil, it would have taken 1,000 

 tons. I dug small holes seventeen feet apart and put one 

 wheelbarrow of good soil in and planted two-year-old 

 sour cherry trees ; then plowed the land and sowed it 

 down with rye. The next Spring I plowed the rye under 

 and sowed buckwheat, which in turn was plowed under, 

 then clover and next rape. I kept plowing two crops a 

 year under for four years. After that the land was 

 left fallow as all good orchards are. Several Summers 

 ago I had the pleasure of seeing that place and those trees 

 had grown so that they were growing into one another. 



and the superintendent said to me that it was one of the 

 best acres of land on tlie estate. 



On the same estate there was another piece of land 

 about one-fourth of an acre, where the soil had been 

 nothing but rough gravel and sand, and according to the 

 general plan, this part had to be planted with trees and 

 shrubs. Spring came along, and there was no time to 

 draw good soil on, so I dug small holes and planted 

 small shrubs, giving each about two shovelfuls of good 

 earth. As we had about six acres of new lawn, we let 

 the grass grow until it was long enough to cut with a 

 scythe; raked it off', and mulched the newly planted 

 shrubs with it. Then for years all such organic waste 

 was put on that piece of land. When I examined the 

 land, the trees and shrubs had grown into a thicket and 

 there were at least four inches of humus on top. I men- 

 tion this place to you, for what can be done on one place, 

 can usually be done on another. The moral of the whole 

 thing is, you have the making of your own garden soil. 



The principal soils are sandy, loam, clay and peat. 

 Sandy soil is principally composed of silica, soda, lime 

 and alumina. Clay is silica, organic matter, lime, carbon- 

 ate and water. Peat soil is principally composed of or- 

 ganic matter ; good loam has all that goes to make a good 

 mixture. Let me suppose that your soil is light sandy 

 and you are going to crop it with vegetables. Give it at 

 the rate of not less than thirty tons of good rotton farm- 

 yard manure to the acre. I know that most of our uni- 

 versity people advise using the manure up when fresh. 

 That is all well enough for clay soils, and if you are not 

 in a hurry for the results. If you cover a lot of fresh 

 straw in light sandy soil, you are going to form voids, 

 with the result that your soil dries out more quickly. It 

 may be all right to turn the hose on. but it is much better 

 to conserve the water in the soil. 



A man with less than one-quarter of an acre should 

 never think of using a plow ; dig it w ith a spade at least 

 twelve inches deep. If you have a small plot you cannot 

 do it justice with a plow and a team of horses, whereas 

 if you dig it and dig it well, most of the work is done 

 at one operation. But as plowing and digging are the 

 fundamentals of agriculture and horticulture, too much 

 stress cannot be laid on this operation, and men who want 

 to have good gardens should learn the principles of dig- 

 ging. If you cannot get enough good manure, take what 

 you can get and make it up with fine bone meal or bone 

 super-phosphate, or, in other words, dissolved bones — 

 these are bones treated with oil of vitriol. Liebig made 

 this discovery and when he found out how valuable bones 

 were as manure, he also found out that his country had 

 been exporting a considerable amount of bone to Britain, 

 33.000 tons a year, as the Britons had been using bone in 

 quantity as crushed bone for years. 



We had about twenty acres of sandy soil, so sandy 

 that if a heavy wind came before the crops were up, the 

 seed was sometimes blown out of the ground. There 

 was a cemetery along side this ground, where it was no 

 uncommon sight to see radishes, lettuce, or cucumbers 

 growing on top of the graves, the seed having blown up 

 out of our gardens. Yet from this piece of land we could 

 take out $2".500 worth of early vegetables every year. If 

 we had had water, there would have been no end to what 

 we could have grown. .Ml crops were oft' early ; we then 

 let the weeds grow up and before they went to seed we 

 turned them under, then in the Fall we put on manure 



