RECLAIMING LAND. 145 



each, which is my special mowing land, but I have others 

 that I mow occasionally. On four acres of that I haul the 

 manure for top-dressing. I cannot call it top-dressing in 

 the ordinary way, because it is made of sea- weed, put into 

 the barn cellar and worked over by the hogs ; I spread that 

 in the fall. The land is plowed the last of May. The 

 manure has gone down into the sod, and a strong growth of 

 grass is upon it, so heavy that I often have to put a chain 

 on the plow in order to bury it. I harrow the ground and 

 plant corn immediately. It is the Early Canada, which will 

 open in ninety days. That green crop underneath makes 

 the ground like a hot-bed, and it starts the corn right up, a 

 good dark green, and it will grow right rapidly. If it comes 

 on a dry time, that crop does not suffer ; the young roots 

 have caught this fertilizer in the sod and have gone down to 

 the green crop underneath, which will furnish a good supply 

 of moisture. The leaves of my corn do not roll, and in the 

 hottest weather, when many of my neighbors are complain- 

 ing of drought, my corn goes right along. I get from sixty 

 to eighty bushels of shelled corn to the acre. 



I would state that I always break up a piece of ground 

 three years in succession in order to get the best results. 

 That clears out all the foul stuff, and gets the land in the 

 right condition to raise a good crop of grass. In August I 

 harrow in rye, a bushel to the acre ; in the winter I put my 

 manure upon that rye again, and when I come to plow that 

 land under the last of May it is up three feet and just as 

 thick as it can stand, and worth a good deal as a fertilizer. 

 I turn that under in the same way that I did the grass. I 

 want to state that I am talking of reclaiming waste land, for 

 I call lands that arc worn out waste lands. I will state the 

 result of sowing that rye. I turned four milch cows on 

 that four acres, and they got nearly their whole living on 

 the land. I got sixty dollars as the result. Is there 

 any business in this world that will pay better than 

 that? That is the plan I have adopted to bring my 

 lands up from four or five tons of hay on the whole farm to 

 forty or fifty tons. I have made it pay, and I can do it with 

 any other farm. The only way in which we can reclaim 

 these worn-out lands is by saving every particle of every- 



