1^89.] PUBLIC DOCUMENT — No. 4. 187 



The condition in which manure should be applied has 

 received less thought than it has deserved. Its action being 

 twofold, — that of affording plant food to the crop, and, to a 

 greater or less extent, of rendering assimilable that already 

 in the soil, — it is most active when fine and evenly dissemi- 

 nated throughout all portions of it. When applied in lumps, 

 with undressed spaces left between them, it is less efiective 

 and the crop is unevenly fed. The mechanical perfection of 

 manurial application is the bringing into close contact a par- 

 ticle of manure with every particle of the soil. 



But economy requires that it be diffused through the seed- 

 bed only. As before stated, the great mass of most grass 

 roots lie in an upper strata of soil some four inches deep. 

 In this they seek their food, and in this it should be placed. 

 They will not seek it very much below this depth, and the 

 soluble portions placed there are liable to be lost in the sub- 

 soil. If applied upon the surface it will reach its destination 

 only as it is washed down to it by rains, being entirely inert 

 during dry periods, and liable to run to waste where the sur- 

 face of the ground becomes hard by frost or other cause. 



Moisture. 

 This in sufficient and constant supply is essential to suc- 

 cessful grass-growing. I say sufficient supply, for it has 

 been said, and probably with substantial truth, that an ordi- 

 nary grass crop exhales in growing twice and a half of its 

 weight of water. The "Marcite" or winter meadows of 

 Lombardy and Piedmont, in the valley of the Po,* which 

 bear grass uninterruptedly from the 8th of September to the 

 25th of the following March, receive during this period 

 successive irrigations of an aggregate depth of eleven hun- 

 dred and eighty-eight inches or ninety-nine feet. I also say 

 constant supply, because receiving its food in solution, this 

 is largely withheld during periods of drought, causing the 

 crop to languish and mature a stunted growth. The drought 

 which prevailed in the valley of the Merrimack, in 1884, 

 cut short the hay crop about one-fifth of the yield anticipated 

 on the first day of June, and destroyed a large percentage 



* Italian Irrigation, by Capt. Baii-d Smith, toI. 2, p. 107. 



