340 



NOTES BY S. W. 



information of others ; but should you succeed, they 

 will add variety to your stock of plants. 



" The first rain since early in July, we had a few 

 days ago. The wheat crop is generally good here 

 not so good, however, as was expected in the spring, 

 owing, it is thought, to the depredations of a worm 

 at the rootof the plant. Smut, in some places, has 

 done considerable harm. AVheat vari-;s in this valley 

 from 50 cts. to $1.00 per bushel. The price has fal- 

 fcn since the miners have returned disappointed from 

 Ft. Colville, about 500 miles north-east of this. 



David Thompson." 



Oregon City, 0. T. 



KOTES BY S. W. 



The red clover plant [Trifotlum pratense) may 

 now be considered the great manuring crop of the 

 country — at least in those limestone regions where the 

 cereal grasses are successfully grown. This invalua- 

 ble plant was first introduced into Pennsylvania about 

 the year 1770, and the value of gypsuia as a manure 

 for both the cereal and herbaceous grasses had been 

 discovered only a short time before. A laborer in 

 Germany, who had worked in stucco-mortar, observed 

 the stimulating effect oi the dust from his clothes on 

 the growth of the grass along the path he traversed 

 to and from his labors. Judge Petkrs, of Peun.syl- 

 vania, that great Einpresario in the agricultural pro- 

 gress of his native State, having learned these inter- 

 esting facts, procured some imported clover seed, and 

 also a bushel of the plaster of Paris from a maker of 

 stucco work in Philadelphia, and commenced the first 

 of those important e.'speriments which have since been 

 reduced to that regular system of farm management 

 which has already added millions to the agricultural 

 profits of Pennsylvania and New York, to say nothing 

 of what red clover has done for the great wheat-grow- 

 ing States of Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, nor what 

 it is to do, sooner or later, tor those prairie soils of the 

 west now so fabulously productive as to deride the 

 idea that they are amenable to the same natural laws 

 which govern all rural economy at the east, where 

 nature demands a quid pro quo to keep her used soil 

 intact. 



The clover plant, by its expansive, leafy foliage, is 

 a great collector of ammonia and carbonic acid from 

 the air, while its long tap root exerts a like influence 

 in collecting from the soil, and sub-soil, both mineral 

 and organic plant food ; hence its great value as a 

 manuring crop. 



The application of plaster to clover not only gives 

 to the plant both lime and sulphuric acid in an avail- 



able form when dissolved by the rains, but it is also 

 supposed to aid in collecting ammonia from the at- 

 mosphere for the benefit of the growing plant. But 

 as plaster is only an inorganic component in plants 

 composed of only two simple substances, sulphuric 

 acid and lime, it cannot be supposed that its repeated 

 application to crops without the aid of those organic 

 ingredients and alkaline salts, contained in clover or 

 stable manure, will produce the same continued ma- 

 nurial cfiiict. 



But there is another reason why clover, as a ma- 

 nuring crop, is a great desideratum to all heavy soils, 

 to wit : ita mechanical effect in making such soils 

 porous and capable of that aeration so necessary for 

 the introduction of the atmospheric ga.sses. Even a 

 sandy soil, when it has lost its vegetable matter, is 

 but little retentive of atmospheric plant lood ; hence 

 the cultivation of red clover on a sandy soil is scarcely 

 less indispensable as a mechanical amendment, than 

 on the most tenaceous clays. For the same reasons 

 Peruvian guano cannot be as permanent a renovator 

 of a soil exhausted of its vegetable matter, as either 

 stable manure or its equivalent, the matured clover 

 plant, plowed in ; because the ammonia of the guano 

 being free, is exhausted by the incumbent crop, while 

 stable manure performs both the mechanical office of 

 keeping the soil porous, while it also retains a por- 

 tion of its ammonia until all its carbonaceous matter 

 is decomposed ; and, as Dr. Wolff well observes, 

 these vegetable manures also " accumulate in the soil 

 a surplus of alkalies" in their final decomposition. — 

 Yet we are gravely told, in this day of light, by 

 sound teachers of science, that guano is worth more 

 to the farmer, at its price, than stable manure would 

 be as a gift, if it must be carted a mile to the field on 

 which it is to be applied. 



Although it must be admitted that Peruvian gu- 

 ano is a good boon to agriculture, and that it is the 

 best and most economical of all concentrated fertili- 

 zers, yet it is a fact thAt in Peru, where it costs no- 

 thing, it is no longer a useful manure without the ad- 

 dition of those amendments which place potash in the 

 soil. 



BonssiNGAULT has probably done more, by his long 

 continued farm experiments at Bechelbronn, than any 

 other master m vegetable chemistry, to develop the 

 secrets of nature in relation to vegetable growth ; and 

 his late experiments go very far to show the mechan- 

 ical importance of vegetable refuse to an arated soil. 

 In 1852 he determined, with his characteristic accu- 

 racy, that the quantity of carbonic acid in the air, en- 

 closed in a good soil, and found in it, is often four 



