80 MONTHLY JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURE. 



in during- summer. At seeding time for ■wheat the half of the said manured acre 

 was sprinkled ivith fifty bushels of lime, bought for $3, being the screenings or 

 refuse of lime sold for building purposes. This lime was plowed into the soil, 

 together with the seed. The produce of the half acre manured only, and not 

 limed, was four bushels and a peck ; that of the other half acre, equallj^ ma- 

 nured, Avith the lime in addition, was seven bushels and three pecks. The wheat 

 from the merely manured half weighed fifty pounds per bushel ; that from the 

 half acre both manured and limed weighed fifty-nine (being, in the aggregate, 

 double the former in weight) — so that the first crop after liming, under rather 

 unfavorable circumstances, paid both for the lime and the labor to haul it out. 



It would seem, by-the-by, that manured land, to yield but 4i bushels, must 

 have been extremely poor, or the loads of manure more like wheel-barrow than 

 wagon loads. Nothing more indefinite than a "load" of manure — it's like 

 speaking of a stone that killed the man, which the witness said was as big as a 

 lump of chalk ! 



A few days since, in company Avith several gentlemen, on Long Island, we 

 walked over a farm, and looked at some lots of wheat, of nine acres each, grow- 

 ing after potatoes, which had received, as the farmer stated, eighty loagon loads 

 of manure, for which he could have had $1 50 per load at his barn-yard ! But, 

 then, he next got his something upward of 200 bushels of potatoes to the acre, 

 off of several of these lots, which brought him 56 cents a bushel ; and, this year, 

 will reap his 30 bushels to the acre of Mediterranean, and 25 bushels of white 

 wheat ; and next he will get, from the same land, his 2\ to 3 tons of hay for sev- 

 eral years — say four to six years — to be consumed by cows, Avhose mnniire is all re- 

 tained on the farm ! Of these he keeps usually from 60 to 120, for all of which his 

 stable is perfectly well arranged ; and out of these he has had, at one time, a lot 

 of 25, that yielded twenty-five quarts of milk each ; all of which is sold at 6i 

 cents a quart in the New-York market — making for these 25 in this flow of milk 

 $1 62| a day each, or over $40 a day for the 25, or for thirty days $1,200 ! 



But as, some of these days, we design to give, for the entertainment of more 

 distant readers, the statistics of one of these milk establishments, let us return to 

 the preparation of seed ivheat. 



We turn to this point of our subject the more anxiously, as we must confess, 

 from the perusal of a letter just received from Col. N. Goldsborough, of Talbot 

 county, Maryland — dated Otwell, 2Sth June, 1846 — in which we are sorry to find 

 a passage, at once so dismal and so instructive, on the subject of steeps, or pick- 

 ling, for seed wheat : " My wheat is wretchedly bad ; fly, scab, rust, and smut 

 — all, all, have assailed it. I abandoned my former plan of liming and brining, 

 and adopted the glauber salt, which was so highly recommended ; and it was 

 carried out strictly to the letter ; but I have been greatly disappointed." Thus 

 are we brouglit more emphatically to consider the subject of steeps. 



Without waiting to inquire whether any kind of steep can act as a manure, to 

 the extent of perceptibly increasing the crop — but meaning to do so, on some 

 early occasion — the universality of the practice of steeping seed wheat in Eng- 

 land, and by the most judicious of American farmers, as the means of preventing 

 or diminishing certain diseases, as smut and rust, ought to be sufiicicnt to prevail 

 witli every farmer not to omit it ; for, besides that it is maintained, on the obser- 

 vation of the most observing and judicious, to be destructive of the fungi to which 

 these diseases are said to owe their origin, the undeniable fact that it affords a 

 ready and convenient method of floating ofl' other seeds and unsound grams, 



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