ECONOMIC. 55 



COLD AND SOUR LANDS. 



"Allow no stagnant miasma holes," says Col. John H. Stevens, "nor 

 useless eyesores to destroy the symmetry, of your lovely farms." Consid- 

 erate attention to adaptation of soil to tree and tree to soil is just as 

 essential in the art of forestry as on any other special line of agriculture. 

 Suppose a farmer has a slough of cold and sour soil and wishes to cover it 

 with trees the very best use what should he plant in it? He should 

 plant none until he has eliminated the cold and sour conditions by plowing, 

 pulverizing and crop-raising, until the alkaline salts are dissolved and thus 

 prepared for tree appropriation. Then he may be able to raise there almost 

 any species of indigenous trees. 



THE DESERT PATCH. 



Suppose he has a high and dry, gravelly or sandy patch, what can he do 

 with it to best advantage? He has never raised anything on it, and despairs 

 of trees, for he may not have succeeded on good soil not knowing how, or 

 if knowing, not having done his duty. He is no farmer who lets his soil be 

 master. Work it up, as with the slough, and sow on it, in the late fall, 

 about two bushels of ash seeds per acre, and harrow them thoroughly, and 

 thinly cover the entire area with straw, manure or other litter. Next 

 spring they will sprout up. Then keep out weeds and fire and let them 

 struggle on. They will soon begin to replenish the soil by carpeting it 

 with decaying leaves that hold the moisture and feed the trees. Within a 

 decade you can safely introduce soft maples, box elders, elms and other 

 trees, for you and nature in harmony have made a soil to grow them in. 



CRANBERRY AGRICULTURE. 



The wild swamps among the woodlands what has nature put there? 

 Scrawny black spruces, clumps of tamarac here and there on little raised 

 islands, pitcher plants, blueberries, mosses innumerable. The peety stuff 

 underneath is water-soaked. It were unjust to nature's economy to call 

 such lands unprofitable as they are. They are her reservoirs, held there 

 under the moss and vine covering, keeping up the water-flow to the lakes 

 and rivers. But it is improvident to let them remain in their wild 

 condition when land is so much in demand. They should be drained, and 

 the drainage controlled, so that the outflow shall not run to waste, but 

 be husbanded in the great lake centers and canals ere long to be dug for 

 irrigation. This done and surface soil prepared, no farming and no other 

 business could be so lucrative as to devote these swamps to cranberry 

 agriculture. 



Thus it is that our sloughs, our desert patches, our swamps and bogs, our 

 oak-openings, our burnt districts, our stony ranges, our bluffy slopes, can, 

 by proper management, be covered with trees and used for wild fruit raising 

 of some sort. 



NATURAL FORESTRY INSUFFICIENT. 



When we undertake retrenchment along this line, why not do it business 

 like? Nature takes no cognizance of the wants of our industries. Natural 



