270 APPENDIX. 



lands, and a part to be mixed with mud for my tillage land. Two 

 hundred bushels of these were spread on about six acres of such 

 grass land, while it was covered with ice, and frozen hard enough to 

 be carted over, without cutting it into ruts. These lands produced 

 from one to two tons of good merchantable hay to the acre, nearly 

 double the crop produced by the same lands last year. And one 

 fact induces me to think, that, being spread on the ice, as above 

 mentioned, a portion of these ashes was washed away by the spring 

 freshet. The fact from which I infer this is, that a run below, 

 over which the water coming from the meadow on which the 

 largest part of these ashes were spread flows, produced more than 

 double the quantity of hay, and that of a very superior quality to 

 what had been ever known to grow on the same land before. 



Seventy bushels of these ashes, together with a quantity not ex- 

 ceeding thirty bushels of mixed coal and wood ashes, made by my 

 kitchen and parlor fires, were mixed with my barn-manure, 

 derived from one horse kept in stable during the winter months, one 

 cow kept through the winter, and one pair of oxen employed almost 

 daily on the road and in the woods, but fed in the barn one hun- 

 dred days. This manure was never measured, but knowing how it 

 was made, by the droppings and litter or bedding of these cattle, 

 farmers can estimate the quantity with a good degree of correct- 

 ness. These ashes and this manure were mixed with a sufficient 

 quantity of the mud above mentioned, by forking it over three 

 times, to manure three acres of corn and potatoes, in hills four feet 

 by about three feet apart, giving a good shovelful to the hill. 

 More than two-thirds of this was grass land, which produced last 

 year about half a ton of hay to the acre, broken up by the plough 

 in April. The remainder was cropped last year without being well 

 manured, with corn and potatoes. Gentlemen, you have seen the 

 crop growing, and matured, and I leave it to you to say whether 

 or not the crop on this land would have been better, had it been 

 dressed with an equal quantity of pure, well rotted barn-manure. 

 For my own part, I believe it would not, but that this experiment 

 proves that peat mud, thus managed, is equal, if not superior, to 

 the same quantity of any other substance in common use as a manure 

 among us, which, if it be a fact, is a fact of immense value to the 



