24 GARDENING FOR PROFIT. 



manure. These will help, certainly, but only as education 

 improves the shallow mind. Luxuriant crops can no more 

 be expected from a thin and poor soil — no matter how 

 much it is cultivated — than fertile ideas from a shallow 

 brain, educate it as you will. 



Drainage. — Every oj)erator in the soil concedes the 

 importance of drainage, yet it is really astonishing to ob- 

 serve how men will work wet lands year after year, wast- 

 ing annually, by loss of crops, twice the amount required 

 to thoroughly drain. A most industrious German, in this 

 vicinity, cultivated about 8 acres for 3 years, barely mak- 

 ing a living; his soil was an excellent loam, but two-thirds 

 of it was so " spongy," that he could never get it plowed 

 until all his neighbors had their crops planted. Driving 

 past one day, I hailed him, asking him why he was so late 

 in getting in his crop, when he explained that if he had 

 begun sooner, his horses would have " bogged " so, he 

 might never have got them out again. I suggested drain- 

 ing, but he replied that would never pay on a leased place ; 

 he had started on a ten years lease, which had only 7 

 years more to run, and that he would only being improv- 

 ing it for his landlord, who would allow him nothing for 

 such improvement. After some further conversation I 

 asked him to jump into my wagon, and in 10 minutes we 

 alighted at a market garden, that had 6 years before been 

 just such a swamp hole as his own, but now, (the middle 

 of May), was luxuriant with vegetation. I explained to 

 him what its former condition had been, and that the in- 

 vesting of $500, in drain tiles, would, in 12 months, put his 

 in the same condition. He, being a shrewd man, acted on 

 the advice, and at the termination of his lease, purchased 



