AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 353 



Judd wlio was one of the proposers of the subject, not yet having 

 appeared, desultory business was taken up. 



Solon Robinson made the following report of a visit to a young 

 farmer : Agreeable to invitation to the club, I made one of a half 

 a dozen that enjoyed the hospitality of our friend George E. 

 Waring, Jr., at Chapaqua, the other day. These pleasant farmer 

 visits are not sufficiently often interchanged. We can always 

 learn something by seeing what others do and how they do it. 

 I learned how he plowed eighteen inches deep, and what the 

 effect of it was. It is a product of at least seventy bushels of 

 ccrn to the acre, with a very large growth of stalks, valuable for 

 fodder, upon land that before it was drained by Mr. Greeley was 

 a bog swamp. It was plowed by the big plow described here by 

 Mr. Waring, of which our jee-about Connecticut friend is so 

 sceptical, and manured one-half with poudrette, and one-half 

 with Mapes' super-phosphate, at the rate of $12 an acre. Both 

 parts are good, but the phosphate will give the greatest yield, 

 and if the season had been a dry one, the crop would without 

 doubt have been one hundred bushels per acre. There is a fine 

 field of carrots on another part of the swamp, that will give, in 

 the opinion of the visitors, a thousand bushels an acre, notwith- 

 standing the wet season. Eut the greatest crop is three-quarters 

 of an acre of Lima beans, that by estimate of the part gathered, 

 will yield four or five hundred bushels in the pod. They sell for 

 56 cents, and shell out eight quarts per bushel, and are without 

 dispute, the best in market this season. These are grown upon 

 upland, but they are the fruit of swamp muck. Other crops, 

 from the same cause and a judicious money-making application 

 of fertilizers, are equally fruitful. I picked the only good 

 tomatoes that I have eaten this year, from a plat where scores 

 of bushels are decaying because the vholesale — mind, the whole- 

 sale — price is so low in this market that they are not worth the 

 picking. Mr. Waring sent down the day I was there, a load of 

 excellent cabbage, large, white, tender heads, that sold for less 

 than one and a half cents a piece. Consumers will pay six to 

 twelve for the same, owing to the beauty of our market system. 

 The Harlem railroad system is equally beautiful. The company 

 charge such high freights that Mr. Waring finds it to his 

 advantage, notwithstanding his place is within a few rods of the 

 station, to wagon his freight seven miles to the river, and he can 

 even leave home in his wagon at the same time the cars start and 



[Am. Inst.] 23 



