134 TALKS ON MANURES. 



should soon find that growing a crop of clover, and leavmg only 

 the roots in the soil, is no way to permanently enrich land. 



I do not say that such a practice will " exhaust" the land. For- 

 tunately, while it is an easy matter to impoverish land, we should 

 have to call in the aid of the most advanced agricultural science, 

 before we could "exhaust'' land of its plant-food. The free use of 

 Nitrate of Soda, or Sulphate of Ammonia, might enable us to do 

 something in the way of exhausting our farms, but i*, would reduce 

 our balance at a bank, or send us to the poor-house, before we had 

 fully robbed the land of its plant-food. 



To exhaust land, by growing and selling clover, is an agricultural 

 impossibilit\% for the simple reason that, long before the soil is 

 exhausted, the clover would produce such a poverty-stricken crop, 

 that we should give iip the attempt. 



We can make our land poor, by growing clover, and selling it ; 

 or, we can make our land rich, by growing clover, and feeding it 

 out on the farm. Or, rather, w^e can make our land rich, by drain- 

 ing it where needed, cultivating it thoroughly, so as to develope 

 the latent plant food existing in the soil, and then by growing 

 clover to take up and organize this plant-food. This is how to 

 make land rich by growing clover. It is not, in one sense, the 

 clover that makes the land rich ; it is the draining and cultivation, 

 that furnishes the food for the clover. The clover takes up this 

 food and concentrates it. The clover does not create the plant- 

 food ; it merely saves it. It is the thorough cultivation that 

 enriches the land, not the clover. 



" I wish," writes a distinguished New York gentleman, who has 

 a farm of barren sand, "you would tell us whether it is best to let 

 clover ripen and rot on the surface, or plow it under when in 

 blossom ? I have heard that it gave more nitrogen to the land to 

 let it ripen and rot on it, but as I am no chemist, I do not know." 



If, instead of plowing under the clover — say the last of June, it 

 •was left to grow a month longer, it is quite possible that the clover- 

 roots and seed would contain more nitrogen than they did a month 

 earlier. It was formerly thought that there was a loss of nitrogen 

 during the ripening process, but the evi<lence is not altogether con- 

 clusive on the point. Still, if I had a piece of sandy land that I 

 wished to enrich by clover, I do not think I should plow it under in 

 June, on the one hand, or let it grow until maturity, and rot down, 

 on the other. I should rather prefer to mow the crop just as it 

 commenced to blossom, and let the clover lie, spread out on tbe 

 land, as left by the machine. There would, I think, be no loss of 

 fertilizing elements by evaporation, while the clover-hay would act 



