Feeding the Land 185 



''self -poisoning." We do not commonly think of 

 a whole peach orchard going off on a spree, say on 

 brandy-peaches, but we may, and sometimes do, 

 in our ignorance, intoxicate the trees to their death. 

 The ignorant grower poisons or starves his own 

 orchard. Thus, seeking figs and finding none, he 

 condemns the tree as unprofitable, overlooking his 

 own contributory negligence. He insists that it do 

 double duty, — ^send forth new growth of wood and 

 fruit abundantly on an empty stomach, or, at least, 

 on short rations. 



But some one may ask: ''If it takes centuries 

 to get fertilizer into plant-food, what can the fruit- 

 grower hope to accomplish? He cannot go back to 

 the Devonian age, or to the time of the American 

 Revolution, and fertilize his ground.'* True, he 

 cannot go backward (though his orchard may), but 

 he can go forward. He can make soil faster 

 than does Nature in the wild ; he can apply fertilizer 

 which will dissolve and become available as plant- 

 food in far less time than the fossil shells which 

 seep as lime-water through his land, from the 

 hills. And herein lies the claim of all commercial 

 fertilizers, that they dissolve rapidly in the soil; this 

 is their chief merit. All forms of decaying plants 

 as fertilizers, — such as grass, clover, vetch, beans, 

 weeds, straw, barnyard manure — ^which is largely 

 straw impregnated with animal excrement, — ^re- 

 quire considerable time to become soluble as plant- 

 food. "Considerable" may here mean from one 

 to five years, as the earth is warm and moist, or 



