LABORS OF SEPTEMBER. 225 



LABORS OF SEPTEMBER. 



This month should be spent pdncipally in making 

 improvements on the farm. No crops of consequence 

 are to be harvested, and lands which would not suffer 

 us to approach them in the spring, on account of their 

 exuberant moisture, may now be ploughed or pared, 

 and burned, and fitted for a next year's harvest of 

 grass. 



Forty or fifty years ago, when some people loved 

 labor better than at present, two or three weeks were 

 often spent in mowing the annual growth of bushes in 

 the cow-pastures, where the plough would do the 

 business much more thoroughly. 



No service or drudgery can be better calculated to 

 make boys dislike farming than this eternal repetition 

 of clipping bushes without a prospect of reducing them. 

 The labor is about as interesting as that of turning 

 a grindstone by hand, or churning cream in cold 

 weather in a dash-churn. 



Wherever the plough can be made to go in a bush- 

 pasture, it should be preferred to any instrument that 

 barely cuts the bushes. These will make good manure 

 when well buried, and it is more pleasant labor to 

 plough than to mow them. Farmers often say we 

 have more land near home than we can manure, and 

 it is folly to plough up our pastures unless we can 

 manure them ; we are only making them poorer. This 

 is not so where a grain crop is not taken off. Every 

 ploughing makes lands richer, provided there is vege- 

 table matter to be buried in the furrow. 



If one ploughing will not kill all the bushes, a second 

 ploughing may finish them ; and it is better to kill half 

 than to let them all stand. Pasture-lands that are 

 turned at this season should be sowed directly with 

 grass-seed : no grain should be thrown on. If plaster of 

 Paris suits the soil, a couple of bushels spread on an 

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