206 HANDY-BOOK OF HUSBANDRY. 



looked at, until the time comes to throw it into the wagons to be 

 hauled out. If the floor of the cellar is a tight clay soil, and if 

 there be no escape for the liquid portion of the manure by surface- 

 draining, there will have been no appreciable loss. 



When a cellar cannot be made, a shed will be found to be a 

 very good substitute. It should be so tight as to. exclude all rain, 

 and its floor so arranged that none of the drainings of the manure 

 can flow away — should be low enough to receive all of the urine 

 of the stable. 



To keep manure in this way will require much more labor than 

 to drop it directly into a cellar, and the saturation of the whole 

 mass with the urine will be far less complete and uniform ; but 

 it will entail much less loss — very much less — than is inevitable 

 under entire exposure to the weather, in heaps, or spread in the 

 barn-yard. 



Under certam circumstances, the best storage place for the 

 manure of the stable is the field where it is to be used. If the 

 land is so situated, and if the soil contains a fair amount of clay, 

 and is in such condition that the water of heavy rains will wash the 

 soluble parts of the manure, not off from, but into, the ground, the 

 surface of the field is the best place for it. We can in no other 

 way distribute the nutritive parts of the manure among the parti- 

 cles of the soil so thoroughly as by allowing them to be washed in 

 among them by falling rains. The only loss sustained in this 

 practice will be by a very slight evaporation of ammonia — very 

 slight, because the formation of volatile ammonia will almost 

 entirely cease when the manure is so spread as to become too cold 

 for rapid decomposition. The soluble ammoniacal salts, and the 

 soluble earthy parts, will be washed into the soil, of which the clay 

 and decomposed organic matter have a very strong absorption 

 action, and which will hold all fertilizing matter that may coat its 

 particles — very much as the fiber of cloth holds the coloring matter 

 of dye stuffs. To continue the comparison, the coating of the par- 

 ticles of soil is not a *' fast color," but is removed by the water of 

 the sap in the roots of plants, and is appropriated to their use. 



The recommendation to spread stable manure directly upon the 



