1890.] PUBLIC DOCUjVIENT — No. 4. 61 



feed him for the next week on pepper. Pepper is good for 

 him, therefore feed him on pepper ! It would be just as 

 sensible as it is to talk about feeding plants with salt, or 

 even with nitrate of soda. What is nitrate of soda? It is 

 a single constituent. What is a plant ? It is made up of a 

 dozen or twenty. Will one constituent take the place of 

 twenty? By no manner of means. You have got to furnish 

 to the plant all those things which the plant needs, and it is 

 nonsense to talk of furnishing one of them to the exclusion 

 of the others. There are three things that plants especially 

 call for in larger quantities than soils furnish. There are 

 three principal constituents which plants of all kinds require 

 more than any others. Those are potash, phosphoric acid 

 and nitrogen. Those are the three things which plants feed 

 upon. Nitrate of soda does not contain them ; ground bone 

 does not contain them ; ashes do not contain them. You 

 have got to give your plants all three, in order to have 

 healthy, thriving, successful plants ; and it is nonsense to 

 talk about furnishing any one of them with the idea that 

 it is going to produce a plant. What is the use of nitrate 

 of soda? Plants that have not nitrogen in them will be 

 benefited by the application of nitrogen in the form of 

 nitrate of soda. The soda itself is of very little use ; it is 

 merely the vehicle in which the nitrogen is conveyed. The 

 object, as I take it, of applying nitrate of soda to any of 

 the early crops, is this. If you feed them with barnyard 

 manure, for instance, there is not enough of that barnyard 

 manure soluble in the spring to feed the plants, especially 

 there is not enough of nitrogen ; and if you give them a 

 little nitrate of soda in addition, it is all very well. The 

 idea that nitrate of soda of itself is going to grow a crop, is 

 nonsense. It is only one of the constituents that contribute 

 to the making of your crop. There are some special things, 

 like sand, that will in some cases favor the production of a 

 crop on account of the mechanical condition into which they 

 put the land. But there is no nourishment in sand, no 

 nourishment in salt. You must furnish everything that the 

 plant needs, and especially those three things which ex- 

 perience has found to be necessary beyond what the soil 

 furnishes. 



