1887 



GLEANINGS IN IJEE CULTURE. 



•585 



up. to get the best lesults. The Acme har- 

 row, figured in Chapter XVI., is a splendid 

 machine, in conmn-tion with the roller, to 

 get this dust ; but it has never worked deep 

 enough to really suit me, especially in stub- 

 born clay soils. 'J'liis spring and summer 

 we have been using a disk harrow tluit 

 pleases me much. 



This machine can be made to cut down so 

 deeply, by adjusting the position of the 

 disks, that it almost plows the ground ; in 

 fact, after digging your early potatoes it 

 will do a very good job of plowing and har- 

 rowing, if yoii pass it over the ground re- 

 peatedly, and cross it in different directions. 

 It not only cuts up tlie linnps, but it scrapes 

 them as you woidd scrape an apple with the 

 point of a case-knife. It also pushes sods, 

 vines, litter, etc., down deep into the ground, 

 instead of tearing them up. It, however, 

 leaves the surface much more uneven than 

 the Acme harrow, and on this account I 

 prefer to follow it with the Acme or Thomas 

 smoothing-liarrow, shown in Chapter X\'1II. 

 Some of you may smile at the idea of having 

 so many tools for a farm of ten acres; but, 

 my friend, if tools enable you to get double 

 the cTop you would have without them, or if 

 you do the work in half the time you could 

 do it with ordinary tools, they will eventu- 

 ally prove to be a saving. 



I want to tell you of a little experiment 

 I made, to show what tilth will do. We had 

 some musk-melons on the creek-bottom 

 ground, that were so nearly used up by the 

 bugs and drought that I had almost decided 

 to' plow them up and put in some other crop. 

 We didn't have enough squash-boxes to go 

 over tlie nuisk-melons, and they were, so to 

 speak, left out in the cold. A gi'eat many 

 of them were used up entirely, and tlie rest 

 looked as if it were utterly impossible they 

 should be of any use. I thought, before 

 plowing them up, I would experiment on 

 them some, so I picked out a nice steel rake. 



The handle had been broken off, so it was 

 not longer tlian an ordinary hoe-handle. 

 The rake had been used so much that the 

 teeth were bright and sharp. Well, with 

 this rake I went around several of the mel- 

 on-plants, and scratched away the surface 

 dirt until I got down to where I could see 

 the white roots coming out on the stem of 

 the plant. This operation of scratching the 

 dirt away with that sharp-toothed rake 

 lined the grouiul up almost like dust. I 

 then fined up the earth for pretty nearly a 

 yard in each direction around the plant. 

 When I had a sufficient iiuantity I banked 



it up around the plant, clear up to the leaves, 

 and I made the bank Hat on top, instead of 

 sharp, the way a good many hill up pota- 

 toes. This gave the plant a dust blanket 

 three or four inches in depth, and perhaps 

 three or four feet across the level top. 



A point comes in right here that I wish 

 to consider, in making plants grow. On or- 

 dinary ground we do not have more than 

 from four to six inches of good rich mellow 

 soil. If you plow down deeper than six 

 inches you turn up lumps of hard subsoil 

 that will spoil your whole crop, as many of 

 you have learned by past experience. Now, 

 instead of plowing down six inches more to 

 get a depth of soil a foit, suppose you scrape 

 off this surface soil from a part of the 

 ground, so as to make it double depth on 

 another part ; you then have ten or twelve 

 inches of line meWow fertile soil; and this 

 will give you a good big crop of almost any 

 thing. 1 first noticed it in scraping off the 

 surface soil where we wanted a road at one 

 end of our long piece of groinid. Where I 

 doubled the dust blanket I could raise mag- 

 nificent cauliflower, and great whopping po- 

 tatoes, with a good many in a hill ; but with 

 a single thickness of dust blanket, the re- 

 sults were only ordinary. Well, now, 

 around my meltii - phr.its I had a double 

 thickness of dust blanket. The melons were 

 six feet apart, and it was no trouble at all to 

 get fine dirt enough to Hx each plant as I 

 have described. What was the effecty Why, 

 those poor, miserable, starved, sickly mel- 

 on-plants of a mcmth or six weeks ago are 

 now the finest I ever owned in my life. I 

 didn't know before that a poor, miserable, 

 sickly plant could be transformed by tilth 

 alone. Wlien I was satisfied with the way 

 it worked 1 cultivated the ground between 

 the melon-plants until it was about as hue 

 as I could get it with a horse, then I got one 

 of my boys, who would do exactly as I told 

 him, and not according to his own notion 

 of things. I told him I wanted all of our 

 melons, squashes, and cucumbers lixed like 

 the sample I did while he was watching. 

 Now, he, like all the rest, was so prone to 

 just pile up the dirt in a sharp hill that it 

 was some little time before I got him to do 

 as I did ; and, by the way, there are a good 

 many boys and men who absolutely will not 

 place the soil so as to make a broad hill 

 around the plant, to catch the rain. They 

 have so long been accustomed to piling the 

 dirt up into a sharp-pointed cone that they 

 won't do it in any other way. Well, this 

 matter of scraping the dirt away with a 



