FINDING AND MAKING SOIL 199 



unsatisfactory yield? We must bring the soil ele- 

 ments together and increase the amount of good plant 

 food. Meanwhile only a small fraction of what we 

 call soil is plant food. For the present a very large 

 amount in bulk is what we have recently learned to 

 call humus. That is a new word with most country 

 home-makers, but it means something vastly im- 

 portant. Humus is incipient soil; it is stuff on the 

 road to be good plant food by and by. 



It was thought for a while that it had no other 

 office than to equalize moisture about the roots and 

 to equalize temperature in the soil. That would be 

 enough, if it were all. There is nothing more im- 

 portant than to keep moisture from rushing up out 

 of the land into the air, and, next to that, we must 

 keep the roots of our plants from feeling every 

 change of weather. Humus is the stockings and the 

 shoes that we put on our plants. But it is more, it 

 is always yielding life. 



Anyone who has learned the importance of humus 

 will understand me when I say I never burn an ounce 

 of organic matter that can be decomposed with any 

 kind of readiness. You can burn up soil in manure 

 piles as easily as in leaf piles. Nearly all manure 

 is charred by too rapid ferment, and the loss is esti- 

 mated at eighty-five per cent of all that is made in 

 the United States. Most of the stuff that is plowed 

 in as manure, or used as top dressing, is already 

 more than half burned. 



The most wasteful method of using weeds, or 



