134 TALKS ON MANURES. 



should soon find that growing a crop of clover, and leaving only 

 the roots in the soil, is no way to permanently enrich land. 



I do not say that such a practice will " exhaust " the land. For- 

 tunately, while it is an easy matter to impoverish land, we should 

 have to call in the aid of the most advanced agricultural science, 

 before we could " exhaust '* land of its plant-food. The free use of 

 Nitrate of Soda, or Sulphate of Ammonia, might enable us to do 

 something in the way of exhausting our farms, but i f . would reduce 

 our balance at a bank, or send us to the poor-house, before we had 

 fully robbed the lind of its plant-food. 



To exhaust land, by growing and selling clover, is an agricultural 

 impossibility, for the simple reason that, long before the soil is 

 exhausted, the clover would produce such a poverty-stricken crop, 

 that we should give up the attempt. 



We can make our land poor, by growing clover, and selling it ; 

 or, we can make our land rich, by growing clover, and feeding it 

 out on the farm. Or, rather, we can make our land rich, by drain- 

 ing it where needed, cultivating it thoroughly, so as to dcvclope 

 the latent plant -food existing in the soil, and then by growing 

 clover to take up and organize this plant-food. This is how to 

 make land rich by growing clover. It is not, in one sense, the 

 clover that makes the land rich ; it is the draining and cultivation, 

 that furnishes the food for the clover. The clover takes up this 

 food and concentrates it. The clover does not create the plant- 

 food; it merely saves it. It is the thorough cultivation that 

 enriches the land, not the clover. 



" I wish," writes a distinguished New York gentleman, who has 

 a farm of barren sand, " you would tell us whether it is best to let 

 clover ripen and rot on the surface, or plow it under when in 

 blossom ? I have heard that it gave more nitrogen to the land to 

 let it ripen and rot on it, but as I am no chemist, I do not know." 



If, instead of plowing under the clover say the last of June, it 

 was left to grow a month longer, it is quite possible that the clover- 

 roots and seed would contahimor:: nitrogen than they did a month 

 earlier. It was formerly thought that there was a loss of nitrogen 

 during the ripening process, but the evi 'ence is not altogether con- 

 clusive on the point. Still, if I had a. piece of sandy land that I 

 wished to enrich by clover, I do not think I should plow it under in 

 June, on the one hand, or let it grow until maturity, and rot down, 

 on the other. I should rather prefer to mow the crop just as it 

 commenced to blossom, and let the clover lie, spread out on the 

 land, as left by the machine. There would, I think, be no loss of 

 fertilizing elements by evaporation, while the clover-hay would act 



