16 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



As fast as we got the stumps blown out we sprinkled wood 

 ashes over the soil, to sweeten it. Then they said, " Now I 

 suppose you are going to use 5 or 6 tons of commercial fer- 

 tilizer ? " I said " 'Not a bit, because the soil is full of miner- 

 als, potash, phosphoric acid, and so on." Somewhere I read 

 that one body of scientists claims that our soil contains enough 

 minerals to last seventeen thousand years, and another that it 

 contains enough to last twenty-four thousand. That doesn't 

 interest me, because, if I live to be as old as my grandfather, 

 who died at ninety-eight, there are still quite a few years left 

 on either reckoning. The trouble with all this mineral mat- 

 ter is, that it isn't available, so the fertilizer manufacturer 

 sells you something that is. When vegetable matter decom- 

 poses, that decomposition generates gas, and that releases the 

 mineral matter, — makes it available. So, no vegetable mat- 

 ter, New England, New York and Ohio abandoned farms, and 

 the boys all gone west. The wonderful, fertile land of the 

 west is just like your land, except that you have eaten up the 

 vegetable matter in the soil. In the first year we planted 

 everything we could think of on that bad land, with the little 

 manure and wood ashes we put on, and that rye that they said 

 wouldn't grow. Never Avould grow, they said ; but it came 

 up in spite of them, and how it did grow ! Then they said, 

 " You ought to sell that for straw ; " but I said, " I can buy 

 straw anywhere, but I can't buy that anywhere." We raised 

 380 varieties of plant growth on that bad land. One man 

 assured me that there was frost on that land every day in the 

 year, and he never told a lie in his life. He had always heard 

 that, and he believed it ; but we found no frost, but an ex- 

 tremely long season, probably five or six weeks longer than 

 you have. 



We tried irrigation, with a common garden hose and a 

 50-cent sprinkler, with an acre of cauliflower, one half watered 

 and the other un watered. We got $4.25 a barrel for the 

 watered lot and the other brought $1.50 per barrel. That 

 irrigation would have paid, in that one year, for the best 

 irrigation plant I could have put in. We watered with the 

 sun on the plants, just as I have seen showers come many a 

 time, and the result was the same as with the showers, — the 



