CHAPTER III. 



Fertilisers Cotton-seed Meal . 



WHILE cotton-seed meal is the cheapest and one of the 

 best fertilizers for new soils, or those not too much 

 exhausted of their potash and phosphoric acid, many 

 people have bad luck with it from a want of knowledge 

 as to how to apply it. The trouble has been that it is either 

 used in the hill or drill, fresh, with the seed, or else planting 

 is done too soon after applying it to the ground. It should 

 always be evenly scattered and well mixed with the soil at 

 least a month ahead, for it not only heats at first, but also 

 breeds thousands of little maggots in cool weather, that bore 

 into seeds of every kind when they sprout, and often into the 

 stems of cabbage and other tender plants. In hot summer 

 and early fall weather, decomposition occurs so quickly that 

 this never occurs. In a month, however, all fermentation is 

 over, the maggots are dead, and then cotton-seed meal is the 

 very best and cheapest of all manures for new land in the 

 coast country. It costs about $18 per ton, while bone meal 

 is $28 to $30, and a ton of it will, the first season, produce 

 more of a crop than two tons of the bone meal. 



The latter is a most excellent fertilizer, and either raw, or, 

 better still, in the form of super-phosphate, will, in the course 

 of a few years, when the soil has been partially exhausted of 

 its soluble phosphoric acid by crops, furnish the best supply 

 of that element. Bone meal is usually too coarse to allow 

 of more than a very small per centage becoming available 

 as plant food the first season, and it is poor economy to bury 

 so valuable a fertilizer a year or two before it can be used by 

 plants. 



Cotton-seed meal contains about 8 per cent, of ammonia, 

 i^ per cent, each of potash and phosphoric acid, and as our 

 lands are well supplied at first with the two latter, even these 



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