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118 



THE ILLmOIS f AEMER. 



April 



BAILHACHE & BAKER - - - PUBLISKEES. 



M. L. DUN LAP, K<litor. 



SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, APRIL, 1863. 



From this time forth until late in Autumn both 

 readers and editor will be busy, very busy from the 

 many new demands imposed on both, from the ab- 

 sence of the usual labor. Scarcely a family but 

 Bome member of it is in the army, while laborers 

 are in the same business, and those at home must 

 "bestir themselves to take care of the usual farm 

 work, giving little time for new improvements, for 

 which we must patiently wait for better times. 



—— 



The Chltcee of Cotton is now becoming one of 

 the regular crops in all that part of the State 

 South of the Great "Western Railroad, and small 

 patches will be planted North of that point. In 

 our visit to the cotton regions of Alabama and 

 Mississippi last season when the crops were being 

 worked, and from a seasons trial on our own 

 grounds, we feel quite competent to give instruc- 

 tion in regard to the culture of this now important 

 crop. In t'li first place any good corn land is 

 suitable for cotton, whether high and rolling or 

 bottom land. All that is required is that water 

 must not stand on ihe surface or so saturate the 

 soil to retard the growth. 



The preparation of the soil is the same as that 

 for corn so far as the plowing is concerned, though 

 doubtless subsoiling would be of great advantage 

 to it, allowing the long top like roots to penetrate 

 more freely. 



After plowing, the surface must be harrowed so 

 as to level it, when it is ready for marking off. 

 This can be done with the common corn planter or 

 marker, making the rows about three feet and eight 

 inches wide. In these drills the seed is to be 

 sown. The seed should be planted in abundance, 

 as there is always a large per centage of loss of the 

 young plants by insects and other causes, hence 

 the necessity of thick seeding. The plants are 

 thinned to six to twelve inches apart in the drills, 

 some planters say two to three feet on rich bottom 

 land. The close planting has a tendency to dwarf 

 the plant and by diminishing the growth of the 

 stalk and the size of the bolls, the crop will ma- 

 ture earlier, and though the bolls are small- 

 er, they more than make up the deficiency in num- 

 ber. 



The seed must not be deeply covered, nor will it 

 answer to have the surface cloddy. If the seeds 



are deeply buried they will rot, and if planted 

 shallow in a dry soil will not germinate. To avoid 

 these two difiiculties, the field roller must be call- 

 ed into requisition to pulverize tlie clods and to 

 press the soil so close to the seed that moisture 

 will be insured in all cases. After sowing the seed 

 in the drills it can be covered sufficiently deep, by 

 giving the whole field a thorough harrowing with 

 a two-liorse harrow, the roller is then passed over 

 it. We could see no diflfereuce in the germinating 

 of the seed whether it was covered half an inch 

 deep, or only pressed into the soil with the roller, 

 while little of that planted deeper came up at all. 

 As cotton must be planted very early in tliis State 

 to insure a good crop, and as the ground is then 

 cold, it will not ansv.er to plant deeply, as warmth 

 and moisture are both essential to the germina- 

 tion of the seeds. Farther South deeper planting 

 would answer, for there the ground is pretty well 

 warmed up at the time of planting. 



All crops grow better under shelter from the 

 winds than when fully exposed to currents of cold 

 air, but cotton, unlike tobacco, needs no move pro- 

 tection than corn, as the only cfrcct would be a 

 less vigorous growth, wliile tobacco is injured by 

 the winds fretting or breaking the leaves. There 

 is little danger of los.i of the cotton at the picking 

 season from free exposuve to the wind, hence this 

 crop can 1)0 planted on the open prairie. 



The young plants make but slow p: ogrtss for 

 the first few weeks, and in weedy land the weeds 

 would make bad work with the crop ; to avoid this, 

 scraping as it is called at the South, is resorted to. 

 This is simply hoeing and scraping away the weed.s 

 from each side of the row, but with our double 

 shovel plows or two-horse cultivators this scraping 

 is not required, an,d all that is required of the hoc 

 is to thin the plants and to cut out the weeds along 

 the row. It is probable that topping may be found 

 of advantage in hastening the maturity of the crop. 



Cotton is a perennial plant and continues to send 

 out new blossoms while the buds are forming and 

 ripening, thus like the Orange presenting ripe fruit 

 and blossoms at the same time, for this reason 

 topping may insure the full development of the 

 bolls if no new sets are allowed to form, and thus 

 compel the plant to adopt the habits of an annual- 



Ci;lt0rk of the Sweet Potato. — In 1844 when 

 we set the first plants of the sweet potatoes that 

 had found their way to the North, the scheme of 

 growing them was looked upon as akin to sugar 

 growing at the North, and about as chimerical, 

 but now the planting of the sweet potato in all 

 parts of the State and the growing of sugar from a 

 Southern cane are both veritable facts. It is true 



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