FINDING AND MAKING SOIL 201 



them under. If the material is very coarse it may be 

 necessary to leave it in the pile for more than a 

 year. 



Try this compost plant at your country home and 

 see how curiously the material that you can use will 

 turn up and increase. Stuff that was in the way be- 

 fore now looks good to you. You clean up your 

 lawns and your gardens and burn nothing but the 

 bigger limbs. The ash of these gives you a little 

 potash, but your compost pile gives you potash and 

 phosphorus and nitrogen all together. 



The most fertile spots on some farms that I know 

 are in the corners of rail fences, where nothing but 

 weeds grow. Haul this to your compost pile. The 

 barnyard manure, mixed even carelessly, will not 

 waste its nitrogen as it will when thrown raw on the 

 field. If you have only half an acre, have also a 

 compost pile; I have five of them for my nine acres. 

 I grow squashes on them during the summer, so that 

 they shall not look unsightly. Into one of them I 

 run my cesspool material from the house. All this 

 is wealth, and not an ounce should be wasted. 



One ton of leaves contains sixteen pounds of nitro- 

 gen, six pounds of phosphoric acid, and six pounds 

 of potash, and the same amount of weeds is worth 

 a good deal more. A ton of old straw is worth 

 nearly as much, and well composted with barn 

 manure, and turned into humus, its value is greatly 

 increased. One of the Southern experiment stations 

 reports that the land normally produces one-fourth 



