THE XEW AGRICULTURE. 205 



for weeks after all others were dead in fields round about, not 

 treated as Mr. Cole is treating his lands. His potatoes average 

 from three to five times the weight of those grown under old 

 methods, and that he has this season grown from ten to twelve 

 hundred bushels to an acre, is a fact, and I have not seen a rotten 

 potato on his place inside of his lines of trenching, while they are 

 found thick enough, on that portion not trenched. 



" What is true of potatoes, is equally true of tomatoes. Where 

 very little manure has been applied directly to the soil, and the 

 waters have been run beneath the plants, impregnated with the 

 manure from the winrow above, not a rotten potato has this year 

 been found on any portion of the place except where chip manure 

 was used. 



" I need not say any more on this point. If there is a person in 

 the world who doubts, they should come and see the squashes 

 growing now on this place. At this date, the last days of Septem- 

 ber, the largest of these squashes, a Chili specimen, measures fifty 

 by fifty-four inches around, and will weigh upwards of an hundred 

 pounds, and seems growing at a rate of three or four pounds per 

 day, and that it will reach and pass the size and weight of the fa- 

 mous specimen of the same variety seen a year or two ago at the 

 seed store of Mr. Peter Henderson in New York, is not unrea- 

 sonable. This of course depends upon the frost holding back. 

 That this squash would, under conditions of underground irriga- 

 tion, reach a weight of three hundred pounds in New Jersey, on 

 Long Island, Staten Island, or in Southern Pennsylvania, I have 

 no doubt. What it would do farther south must be left for exper- 

 iment. Should the Government conclude to establish an Experi- 

 mental Station at Washington, as has been suggested, it is not 

 improbable that specimens of the Chili squash will be grown 

 weighing from four to five hundred pounds. 



