i8o 



THE IRRIGATION AGE, 



each side the furrow and upward as well as down- 

 ward, to allow the wetting to be quite uniform and 

 not dry too quickly at the top, while it also has 

 enough gravel to keep it from stiffening too quickly 

 when it reaches a certain point of dryness. It gen- 

 erally retains moisture well with cultivation, and has 

 enough capillary attraction to bring up moisture 

 from below to roots near the surface as fast as the 

 surface moisture dries away. 



WILL THE SOIL SUSTAIN A SMALL STREAM? 



The most important thing therefore to determine 

 at the outset is, whether your soil will hold up a small 

 stream or not. If it will it is quite apt to have the 

 other qualities of upland. If it can be irrigated from 



deep, made in ground plowed and harrowed as ready 

 for planting. Get a hoe and watch it, and don't 

 allow any ass of a neighbor to come around and tell 

 you that that little stream is never going to get any- 

 where. And don't lose your patience if you find that 

 it is miserably slow, while the aforesaid neighbor 

 tells you that folks that write books don't know any- 

 thing practical. 



TIME IT. 



Measure off so many yards of the furrow and time 

 the stream. If it runs a yard a minute without any 

 special coaxing it is doing finely and your soil may 

 be irrigated in any way. If it will run ninety feet in 

 half an hour without any more coaxing than taking 



A SPECIMEN OF VERY BAD FURROW IRRIGATION. 



Amount of Water about Five Times too great: Uneven Feed of Water into the Different Furrows: Such Work Washes Off the 

 Fertilizers, Leaches the Natural Fertility out of it and is in Every Way Bad, because Wholly Unnecessary. 



small furrows it may be worth twice as much as if 

 you have to flood it, while it is quite certain to be 

 worth twenty per cent, more in the saving of labor 

 alone. Land of this sort you can always flood if you 

 wish, or irrigate in any other way. But land that 

 has to be flooded is generally limited to that method 

 alone. 



To test this point, turn out a stream of one gallon 

 a minute, which is about one-ninth of a miner's inch 

 under four-inch pressure. It takes little trouble to 

 be tolerably accurate, so measure it with your watch. 

 A kerosene can, which it should take about five 

 minutes to fill, is handy on almost every place. 

 Turn this stream into a furrow about three inches 



an occasional clod out of the way or breaking down 

 the barrier of some little basin it has made, it is all 

 right. You can coax it at double or triple this speed 

 by smoothing its course with the hoe just in front of 

 it. But as you cannot do this in practical work on 

 any extensive scale, you must test it, as it will run 

 without special coaxing. 



In a field of any considerable size you cannot coax 

 it very much. About all you can do is to go over the 

 field with the hoe and see that one furrow has not 

 broken into another, or that a gopher hole is not tak- 

 ing all of one or more furrows. In passing you may 

 throw out a clod of earth here and break a little dam 

 there, but that is about all you can do. You must 



