l8 MAKING HORTICULTURE PAY 



age, but a simple method of laying tile. Joseph 

 Rennie of Lake county, Illinois, writes : 



" I have 15 acres of land devoted to the raising of 

 vegetables, and five acres of that area are drained. 

 My first attempts at draining were a failure. The 

 reason for this I afterward found to be that I had 

 placed the tile only 2 feet deep, and the water never 

 drained out, so that the ground above the tile was 

 dry. An old farmer said to me : ' It isn't the sur- 

 face water that spoils your crop, it is the suck 

 water.' 



" I relaid all the tile 3^2 feet deep in the shallow- 

 est places, and as much as 6 feet deep in some of 

 the other places. I got a good fall, and all of the 

 tile is below the frost line. I think the frost does 

 not hurt the tile, even when it is not below the 

 frost line, provided the water can all flow out and 

 not get frozen up in the tile. If it freezes in the 

 tile, the tile will go to pieces. 



" Part of my tile is laid in quicksand, but it has 

 given me no trouble. In laying in quicksand it is 

 only necessary to get a smooth surface on which 

 to lay the tile, and then pack in around it with the 

 surface soil. The quicksand taken out of the ditch 

 can be used to cover over the top of the surface 

 soil. Some of my neighbors in laying tile in quick- 

 sand cover the joints with tarred paper, fearing that 

 the sand will run in around the joints and fill up 

 the tile, but I believe little sand goes in. 



" My soil is a sandy loam, and I lay my lines of 

 tile 30 feet apart. Some of my neighbors who have 

 a heavy clay soil lay their lines about a rod apart. 

 My method differs in that I run all of my lines 

 parallel to each other, and each line empties into 

 an open ditch. The other way is to lay one main 

 line of, say, 8-inch tile and have a large number of 



