SPECIAL CROPS. 226 



two pecks per acre, depending on number of rows, two oi' three 

 feet distant being a guide ; cover with a wooden tooth liarrow, 

 cotton coverer or roller, but about one half to one inch deep — 

 best about one inch. When the plant is about two to three 

 inches high, the two to four first blades 'bar off',' or run a 

 cotton scraper as for scraping cotton, not deep, merely to shave 

 off the surface; then, with a sharp hoe, scrape the entire surface, 

 leaving it clean — cut off" all weeds, grass and rice. In a few 

 days the rice will be up, and as the season has become warmer, 

 the rice grows faster; a bull tougtie plow can be used near the 

 plant so as to turn enough earth to it on each side as to cover 

 the earth and mould the plant. AVhen some six inches high, 

 pass the hoe through the row, leaving trenches about one foot 

 distant. Keep clean with cultivator, sweep or shovel plow, stir 

 from time to time to keep plant growing. To be harvested by 

 the sickle and left for two 'days to cure, by shocking up ; open- 

 ing out and shocking as good hay or fodder is made. Thresh 

 by flail, by machinery, by the old plan of horse tramping on it, 

 or by striking the heads over some pieces of wood." 



Tobacco Culture is, for the time being, a paying crop, but 

 it exhausts the soil more rapidly than any other crop. Any 

 methods of culture that leave this fact out of view are faulty ; 

 as they enrich the land owner at the expense of all the fertility of 

 his land. And when land is once exhausted of its fertility by 

 the cultivation of tobacco, no process can make it profitable to 

 cultivate them again for any crop whatever. For proof of this 

 look at the exhausted and abandoned lands of Virginia and 

 Maryland. So far as the system of cultivation, urged in the 

 following pages, is different from others, it is because this idea 

 is prominent, viz : any method of culture that steadily exhausts the 

 land, is faulty and ruinous. Tobacco will grow on almost any soil 



