GREEN MANURES. S69 



known to have been speedily renovated. It is no objection to 

 this mode of treatment, which is of great antiquity, to say 

 that it has only a temporary value, because the same must be 

 said of any other way of manuring. 



The following experiments attest the value of the practice : — 

 " I received &om. a neighbouring farmer a field naturally barren, 

 and so much exhausted by iU management, that the two preceding 

 crops had not returned a quantity of corn equal to that which had been 

 sowed upon it. An adjoining plantation afforded me a large quantity 

 of Fern, which I proposed to employ as manure for a crop of Turnips. 

 This was cut between the 10th and 20th of June ; but as the small 

 cotyledons of the Turnip-seed afford little to feed the young plant, and 

 as the soil, owing to its extreme poverty, could not yield much nutri- 

 ment, I thought it necessary to place the Fern a few days in a heap, to 

 ferment sufB.oiently to destroy life in it, and to produce an exudation 

 of its juices ; and it was then committed, ia rows, to the soil, and the 

 Turnip-seed deposited with,a drilliag machine over it. Some adjoining 

 rows were manured with the black vegetable mould obtained from the 

 site of an old wood-pile, mixed with the slender branches of trees in 

 every stage of decomposition, the quantity placed in each row appearing 

 to me to exceed more than four times the amount of the vegetable 

 mould, which the green Fern, if equally decomposed, would have 

 yielded. The crop succeeded in both cases, but the plants upon the 

 green Fern grew with greatly more rapidity than the others, and even 

 than those which had been manured with the produce of my fold and 

 stable-yard, and were distinguishable in the autumn from the plants 

 in every other part of the field by the deeper shade of their foliage." 

 — Knight, in Sort, Trans., i. 260. 



A writer in a Bavarian weekly journal recommends sowing Borage, 

 and when it is full grown ploughing it down. The good effects of 

 this plant as a green manure he has proved by long experience. 

 What renders it preferable to most other plants for this purpose is the 

 great quantity of soda and other salts which it contains. It may be 

 sown in AprU, and ploughed down in August in time to be followed by 

 Wheat. {Gardeners' Magazine, i. 200.) 



"I had been engaged in the year 1810 in some experiments from 

 which I hoped to obtain, new varieties of the Plum, but only one of the 

 blossoms upon which I had operated escaped the excessive severity of 

 the frost in the spring. The seed which this afforded, having been 

 preserved in mould during the winter, was in March placed in a small 

 garden-pot, which was nearly filled with the living leaves and roots of 

 grasses, mixed with a small quantity of earth, and this was sufficiently 

 covered with a layer of mould, which contained the . roots only of 

 grasses, to prevent in a great measure the growth of the plants which 



