74" A TREATISE ON NUT CULTURE. 



IMPROVED CHESTNUT CULTURE. 



A NEW INDUSTRY WASTE PEACES MADE GLAD. 



From Rural New Yorker. 



The Rural New Yorker has always stoutly contended that American 

 agriculture,* from the day the Pilgrims left the Mayflower, has been but a 

 record of utilizing wastes. The first corn crops grown in New England were 

 planted on worn-out soil, with a large fish in each hill for manure. From that 

 day to the present, American farming, as it spread toward the West, has ever 

 gone through the same performance; exhaust the land by continuous cropping 

 and then either run away from it " out West," or make use of manurial sub- 

 stances that were previously regarded as useless wastes. Save the wastes or 

 retreat ! That has been the alternative, and this question of waste-saving has 

 been so well studied and practiced that immigration to the West has been 

 almost stopped, while to-day alert Eastern farmers on the old soil, that has 

 given crops for more than a century and a half, have safely weathered the 

 storm of business depression: 



But how about the waste land? In every neighborhood on almost every 

 farm east of the Ohio River there are rough and .rocky hillsides, where, 

 apparently, nothing but wood will grow. These places are usually held at a 

 loss except as they furnish firewood or timber. It is doubtful if much of this 

 timber-land will yield income enough to pay taxes much less interest on the 

 value at which the land is held. The object of these articles is to describe one 

 of these rocky hillsides that has been cheaply utilized for a profitable crop. 

 It is waste land turned to account. On the hillside, so steep, rocky and hard 

 that a woodchuck could not burrow in it, I saw a crop growing that will in a 

 few years yield as much money to the acre as a crop of potatoes. This crop 

 requires neither plow, cultivator nor harrow neither manure nor fertilizer 

 nothing but knife and brush-scythe. The crop is improved Chestnuts. 



There is no fairy tale about this business. The hill, the trees and the man 

 are all to be found any day. At Marietta, Pa., close to the east bank of the 

 Susquehanna River, lives Mr. H. M. Engle, well-known to our readers as a 

 good farmer and an expert in nut culture. On the east side of the river is a 

 gently rolling country, stretching back for miles, and covered with beautiful 

 farms. Directly opposite, on the west bank, steep hills shoot up almost 

 directly from the water's edge. This ridge is thickly covered with timber 

 Chestnut predominating. The land has never been cultivated nor can it ever 

 be with ordinary crops, being far too rocky and steep for horse or farm tools. 

 It must ever remain in forest. As to the value of such land, Mr. Engle says 



