172 WHAT I KNOW OF FARMING. 



a bad job, leaving the tubers untouched and unsus- 

 pected in the ground. 



I doubt that the Potato was found growing by 

 Europeans in any part of this country, unless it be in 

 that we have acquired from Mexico. It is essentially 

 a child of the mountains, and I presume it grew wild 

 nowhere else than on the sides of the great chain 

 which traversed Spanish America, at a height of from 

 5,000 to 8,000 feet above the surface of the ocean. 

 Here it found a climate cooled by the elevation and 

 moistened by melting snows from above and by fre- 

 quent showers, yet one which seldom allowed the 

 ground to be frozen to any considerable depth, while 

 the pure and bracing atmosphere was congenial to its 

 nature and requirements. In this country, the Potato 

 is hardiest and thriftiest among the White Mountains 

 of New-Hampshire, the Green Mountains of Vermont, 

 on the Catskills and kindred elevations in our own 

 State, and in similar regions of Pennsly vania and the 

 States further South and West. 



My own place is at least 15 miles from, and 500 feet 

 above, Long Island Sound ; yet I cannot make the 

 Potato, by the most generous treatment, so prolific 

 as it was in New-Hampshire in my boyhood, where I 

 dug a bushel from 14 hills, grown on rough, hard 

 ground, but which, having just been .cleared of a 

 thick growth of bushes and briars, was probably 

 better adapted to this crop than though it had been 

 covered an inch deep with barn-yard manure. 



He who has a tolerably dry, warm, or sandy soil, 



