POTATO CULTURE. iso 



just run on the side of the share, and make but little mark. 

 The horses soon learn, when I plow, to spin across the ends. 

 It takes a little skill and gumption to lose hardly a second 

 at the corners, in turning the plow out and setting it in. 



Now, in three years we will plow this field again. If we 

 plowed the same way we should be piling up a ridge in the 

 center, and making great deep furrows around the outside, 

 which is about as objectionable as throwing all the earth 

 out, year after year, making banks around the fences and a 

 depression in the center, and at lines from the corners to the 

 dead-furrow. Many fields are so treated . It is wrong. The 

 land should be kept level. To do this and not tramp the 



ground, which is equally important, or more so, not tramp 



r 



n 



FIG. 2. PLOWING SAME FIELD THREE YEARS LATER, SO 

 AS TO KEEP GROUND LEVEL. 



it any more than we did this year, we begin plowing (Fig. 2) 

 at w, setting the plow in on dotted line o, ten feet from the 

 end of the field, driving the off horse in the furrow left from 

 three years before, until the plow reaches the dotted line p, 

 ten feet from the other end. Then we slide across on the 

 ten-foot head -land, " empty ;" set in ten feet from the end 

 at r ; fill the furrow that side to the dotted line o ; run empty 

 across the head-land, and so on until the field is done except 

 the head-lands. We are careful to finish so the dead-furrow 

 is exactly where the ridge was made three years before. 

 How hard it is to get a man with gumption enough to do 

 this exactly ! Then after harrowing we take our scraper 

 potato-coverer, pictured in chapter 6 ; attach a board in a 

 few minutes so as to make it like a road-grader (now friend 



