SECRETAEY'S REPORT. 67 



as compared with our shorter season of less than four. A light 

 corn soil, enriched as' if for corn — that is to say, forty loads to 

 the acre, (more or less,) compost, such as a farmer would give 

 to it for corn, to promote the formation of the roots of the young 

 plant, and establish it — I have found to be the best. After that, 

 no barnyard manures are required, only mineral manures. 

 Indeed, I have given up, from the necessity of the case, in the 

 light of my long experience, the use of barnyard manures, and 

 give only potashes, which are indispensable, in tlie form of wood 

 ashes, and sulphur, which I have found to be also indispensable 

 to the perfect health of the grape. It is a sort of medicine for 

 all those diseases incident to the grape, growing out of bad sub- 

 stances in the soil, or growing out of atmospheric influences or 

 any other. I apply it in the form of gypsum, which is nearly 

 one-half sulphur. Phosphate of lime is also indispensable. 

 This promotes the formation of roots more than any other 

 manure, except thoroughly decomposed cow manure, which is 

 in some sort a substitute for bone dust, containing as it does, 

 considerable phosphate of lime, and promoting the formation of 

 roots, as it does, certainly in the same way and to the same 

 extent that the phosphate of lime does. 



Let me say that the quantity of manure I should apply to the 

 acre, after the vines get to bearing, would be twenty bushels of 

 wood ashes, twenty bushels of fine bone dust, and five bushels 

 of plaster of Paris — gypsum — sown broadcast, and worked in 

 lightly. Once in three years, that application will be sufficient 

 for any vineyard which is thrifty and of hardy grapes, or for any 

 vineyard well established, to keep it up to a full crop, and to 

 make as much wood as a grape-vine ought to make ; which 

 wood will be solid and strong, and consequently hardy, and 

 capable of enduring our winters. 



Although the soil should be perfectly adapted to the grape, 

 you still want a good aspect. A south aspect is by universal 

 consent the best. The grape is a child of the sun, and it wants 

 heat — heat at the root and heat at the top. I have seen the 

 thermometer at one hundred and four degrees, and the soil at 

 one hundred and thirty degrees, when the thermometer was 

 inse^rted in the sandy loam, but I have never yet seen a day so 

 hot that it curled a leaf of the grape or seemed to have the 

 slightest pernicious effect upon it ; on the contrary, it seemed 



