216 PLAIN AND PLEASANT TALK 



do very well ; but if you aspire to do the very best, another 

 course must be first pursued. The first spadeful must be 

 thrown out, and a second depth gained, and then the top 

 soil returned. This is comparatively slow and laborious, 

 but it need not be done more than once in five years, and 

 by dividing the garden into sections, and performing this 

 thorough-spading on one of the sections each year, the pro 

 cess will be found, practically, less burdensome than it seems 

 to be. 



GETTING POOR ON RICH LAND AND RICH ON POOR LAND. 



A CLOSE observer of men and things told us the follow 

 ing little history, which we hope will plow very deeply into 

 the attention of all who plow very shallow in their soils. 



Two brothers settled together in county. One of 



them on a cold, ugly, clay soil, covered with black-jack 

 oak, not one of which was large enough to make a half 

 dozen rails. This man would never drive any but large, 

 powerful, Conastoga horses, some seventeen hands high. He 

 always put three horses to a large plow, and plunged it in 

 some ten inches deep. This deep plowing he invariably 

 practised and cultivated thoroughly afterward. He raised 

 his seventy bushels of corn to the acre. 



This man had a brother about six miles off, settled on 

 a rich White River bottom-land farm and while a black 

 jack clay soil yielded seventy bushels to the acre, this fine 

 bottom-land would not average fifty. One brother was 

 steadily growing rich on poor land, and the other steadily 

 growing poor on rich land. 



One day the bottom-land brother came down to see the 

 black-jack oak farmer, and they began to talk about their 

 crops and farms, as farmers are very apt to do. 



