36 MANURES. 



be laid in heaps, in their juicy state, and occasionally turned 

 over and covered with soil, they will certainly perish, and 

 speedily become putrid. 



The leaves of trees also form a vegetable manure, though 

 not a very good one; for although leaves enrich, to a certain 

 degree, the surface upon which they fall and decay, they will 

 rarely repay the expenses of collecting them expressly for 

 manuring land. But where they can be readily collected in 

 quantity, they make an excellent addition to the vegetable 

 matter of the barn-yard and the pig-sty. 



The other principal vegetable substances employed as manure 

 in their separate state are the following: 



The ashes of wood and all vegetables may be used as a 

 manure. They have a marked and very beneficial effect when 

 applied as a top dressing, especially to grass lands; they also 

 answer a most valuable purpose when applied to Indian corn, 

 particularly when the soil is not suitable to that plant. 



In all new countries, such is the fertility of the soil, and the 

 abundance of native salts and vegetable matter furnished through 

 a long course of growth and decay, that the first series of cul- 

 tivators find little use for the manures, and the expedients for 

 meliorating the soil, which are so necessary in the older culti- 

 vated countries. Hence, materials which are considered in- 

 valuable for these purposes in the states on our seaboard, from 

 Maine to Louisiana, and in Europe, and other countries, arc, 

 in our new settlements, considered as a nuisance, and wasted 

 in immense quantities.* 



One of the most prominent articles used in manure along 

 the seaboard, and sought after with an avidity that shows its 

 real value in meliorating the soil, is leached ashes, a substance 

 which appears to have received no attention from the farmers 

 of the interior, except it was to devise some easy method of 

 disposing of the quantities so rapidly accumulating around their 

 leach-tubs and asheries. Millions of bushels we might almost 

 say loads of this valuable material are annually wasted. 



There is scarcely a process in farming, or an article used for 

 substantially improving the soil, for which more decisive tes- 

 timony can be found, than may be adduced in favour of ashes 

 as a manure. 



Under the head of stimulating- manures, CHAPTAL, in his 

 justly celebrated work on agriculture, makes these remarks: 



* From forty-five to seventy years back, the great difficulty with many far- 

 mers, residing in this state east of the Susquehanna, was how to get rid of their 

 stable manure. Many who had fixed barns, carted the manure early in spring 

 to the nearest creek to be carried off by the succeeding freshet, while thousands 

 of stacks were suffered to waste. The descendants of these farmers now know 

 the value and importance of that which their forefathers discarded. 



