162 THE IRR1 GA Tl ON A GE. 







plant, all portable but the points, is located on the highest ground in 

 a forty acre corner of Mr. Holcomb's garden. The pump and engine 

 could easily serve a second battery of points in another similar field, 

 giving forty acres a wetting while the first is drying out and being 

 cultivated. The water is carried from the pump in two ditches over 

 this forty, running substantially parallel with each other, across the 

 field. When I was there the crops were cabbage, the harvest of 

 which had just been concluded, and tomatoes which had followed 

 early peas. The rows of cabbage and tomatoes ran clear across the 

 "forty" and intersected both ditches. The ditch banks were thrown 

 up with lister and plow entirely. They required reconstruction pre- 

 vious to every application of water. The force required to operate 

 the system was an engineer and a man and boy to handle the water. 

 The mode of application, was to begin at the lower end of one of the 

 ditches; there the ditch bank was opened for four rows on each side 

 of the ditch and the water allowed to run sufficiently, when a sheet- 

 iron dam was forced into the soft dirt of the ditch banks and four 

 more openings, opposite the next four rows, were made in the ditch 

 bank, and so on. In practice, six acres per day was all that such an 

 outfit got over; at the following cost: 



Coal $1.50 



Engineer 1.50 



Man 1.00 



Boy 50 



Total .$4.50, or 75 cts. per acre. 



The cabbage was irrigated three times; the peas twice, and the to- 

 matoes twice. The yield of early cabbage was, last season, fourteen 

 tons per acre. In the neighborhood of large towns, hydrant water 

 has been used for hot beds and intensive gardening. 



The new celery culture contemplates a perforated pipe for every 

 row. I have seen it in far away Florida. Thirteen cars of celery 

 were received by one Kansas City commission house in one week this 

 fall and every stalk of that celery crossed Kansas the long way. It 

 seems to me that celery ought to be headed off by us. Mr. J. H. 

 Hale, the famous nurseryman, irrigates his nurseries and small fruit 

 plantations in far away Connecticut on the Atlantic coast with all its 

 fogs and drizzling rains and he says it pays. If it pays a gardener to 

 irrigate there, where the moist breath of the ocean is in the air, what 

 would it not do in a country like Kansas, where a summer 

 sun and thirsty winds conspire together to dissipate the soil 

 moisture. 



Not only is ditch water in effect a manufactory of fertilizer, as 

 jt flows along, and a substitute for, if not an improvement upon, the 

 early and the later rains, but it is also more nearly a specific for the 

 diseases that threaten the welfare of garden and orchard growths 



