94 ORANGE CULTURE IN FLORIDA. 



help forward a grove of trees wonderfully. It is 

 still better if this be accompanied by a liberal dress- 

 ing of wood-ashes. One ton to the acre is not too 

 much. 



Manures from the stables, cow-pens, hennery, and 

 pig-sty, indeed from every place where waste is de- 

 posited, should first be deodorized by the liberal 

 use of land plaster or sulphate of iron copperas 

 dissolved in water and composted with muck, and 

 be carefully saved and utilized. As they are highly 

 stimulating, they should be composted with three or 

 four times the quantity of muck, and frequently 

 turned before using. 



But of all the manures, that which is cheapest 

 and most abundant is the muck to be found in our 

 rivers, creeks, lakes, and ponds. A good article 

 of muck is little less than decomposed vegetable 

 matter. Leaves, wood, weeds, and grass, as they 

 have fallen, have been washed into these deposits and 

 decomposed underwater so slowly and so excluded 

 from the atmosphere that they have lost little of 

 their original elements. Here they have been pre- 

 served by nature, as in the crucible of the chemist, 

 for ages, and now lie in rich and vast deposits for 

 the use of the orange-grower. Some who have 

 supposed they were using muck have been mistak- 

 en. They have found a black sand with a little 

 vegetable matter with it. If they had taken a little 

 of it and washed it they would have found little else 

 than sand, and some of it, that of a brown granular 



