20 



My meadow is completely drained. It was ploughed in the 

 spring, and promises to yield a good crop of potatoes.* No water 

 now stands upon it and none remains after rains longer than upon 

 aay other part of the farm, which is as level. I design to plant it 

 one year more, when I think all the sods and hillocks will be com- 

 pletely crumbled and then lay it down in grass, confident of success 

 from the result of a similar experiment on a piece of land about one 

 fourth of an acre, which from being impassable, worthless, and filled 

 with skunk cabbage and other noxious weeds, is now the best piece 

 of grass land on the place; and though drained and laid down after 

 one summer's fallow with manure and with sowing only a few tur- 

 nips, with hoeings sufficient to break the sods to pieces and after- 

 wards sown with grass seed and carefully rolled, has this year 

 yielded two abundant crops of excellent hay. 



I have applied sea sand to wet land, ploughing it in, but perhaps 

 from using it too copiously thought that the land was impoverished 

 fey it. I have seen meadows made hard by covering them with 

 gravel ; but besides the expense deem it of doubtful expediency to 

 cover land with a perfectly barren and inert substance. My own 

 experiments in this way kave not been satisfactory ; and as the late 

 intelligent President of the Essex Agricultural Society remarks,"!" 

 **if meadows admit of being thoroughly drained by ditching, I 

 would never carry on gravel or sand, absolutely barren substances." 

 In most cases of meadows reclaimed by gravel the produce has been 

 of a very ordinary quality ; and filled with plants accustomed to wet 

 and soaked lands, which afford an herbage neither savory nor nu- 

 trious to cattle. 



The drains formed as above, where stones are near and abund- 

 ant are not expensive ; and if well made will stand, according to 

 the best writers, for half a century. An intelligent English farmer 

 recommends that whenever made, they should be laid down on a plan 

 of the farm, so that if occasion should require they may be found 

 and repaired without difficulty. They should be sufficiently nu- 

 merous and capacious to take off' all the water that is likely to be 

 led into them without much delay ; otherwise as it is sometimes 

 termed they become blown, that is, the water forces itself up on 

 the top of the ground. I have several acres of wet land, of little 



• The crop was planted in very wide rowc and measured about one hundred 

 and fifty bushels — November, 1629, 

 1 Col. Pickering. 



