100 INDIAN CORN. 



On this subject, therefore, the farmer is left to 

 depend very much on his own resources. Yet in all 

 this he finds no occasion for despondency. He finds 

 that a sound judgment carefully exercised in the light 

 of the experience of former years, and guided by those 

 hints and indications that Nature is ever presenting 

 to inquisitive minds, will nearly always shape out for 

 him the course of safety and success. In settling prac- 

 tically the question when to plant his corn, he ban- 

 ishes from his mind all those maxims that embody 

 their entire wisdom in a specified date, or in a pre- 

 scribed stage of the moon, and examines the condition 

 of the soil and the state of the vegetable world for 

 traces and indications more to be relied on. 



" There is a right and a ~best time for planting 

 corn," says a very sensible writer in the Country Gentle- 

 man, " and by employing just that time for the pur- 

 pose, a farmer may all the more confidently calcu- 

 late, if he do not fail or err somewhere else, on raising 

 a maximum crop, not only of the grain but of the 

 stalks also. And the right and best time is to be dis- 

 covered, not by the almanac, nor by the practice of 

 neighbors, who ' think that from the 10th to the 20th 

 of May is the proper time for planting,' nor by blindly 

 copying after some one whose whim it may be to 

 plant < seldom or never later than the fifth day ' of 

 May, but simply by observing the progress of vege- 

 tation in soils resembling that in which the planting 

 is to be done. Vegetation will start sooner in sandy 

 loams, and all such soils as contain much sand or 

 humus, than in those in which clay predominates. 



