4 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



ploughed for about twenty-five years. Part of it was quite 

 rocky, and there was some brush upon it. My object in plough- 

 ing and planting it was to convert it into mowing. The other 

 acre and a half had been mowed for twenty or more years suc- 

 cessively, without manure. On one acre and one-half I spread 

 fifty loads of stable manure, and ploughed under the furrow, and 

 dunged in the hill with fifteen loads of manure from a hog-pen. 

 The rest of the planting ground was manured lightly in the hill 

 only. In all, I used ninety-five ox-cart loads of manure. I 

 sowed about two acres that were planted the previous year with 

 oats and grass seed. The drought of summer injured my crops 

 very much, especially corn and oats. Before planting, I removed 

 the rocks from a field of about five acres that was seeded to grass 

 the year before, and also cleared about six acres of rock heaps 

 where they averaged about a heap of four to six bushels of small 

 stones to the square rod. This enabled me to mow with a 

 machine about twenty-five acres. In June, I broke up a piece 

 of about three acres of exhausted pastviring that had not been 

 ploughed for about forty-five years, and sowed it with buckwheat. 

 My purpose was to rot the sod, then manure and plant, and 

 re-seed for pasturing. My crops were about as follows : Oats, 

 thirty-one bushels ; potatoes, one hundred and seventy-six 

 bushels ; corn, one hundred and forty-six bushel baskets of ears ; 

 buckwheat, twenty-seven and one-half bushels ; apples of all 

 kinds, about three hundred bushels. I would here say, •! dislike 

 " estimates." I know the value of these apples to a cent, but as 

 they were marketed at different times and in different ways, I 

 cannot tell within five bushels the exact quantity. I had also 

 about twenty dollars' worth of peaches, two cartloads of pump- 

 kins, three hundred and fifty pounds Hubbard squashes, and a 

 fine lot of melons and garden vegetables. A milk route was 

 started in our neighborhood July 1st, and to accommodate 

 myself to the new order of things, I commenced exchanging 

 my young stock for cows, as I wished to help sustain the route 

 and make selling milk a business. Aside from this consideration, 

 I think my profits would have been larger to have kept my 

 young stock another year. My account will show what disposal 

 was made of the crops. I preferred, as far as practicable, to 

 market them by feeding my cows. 



