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POSSIBILITIES OF MUCK SOIL 



groTVTi on new land the first year, provided you start to break your 

 land early enough. Plow in fall and level in spring. I have seen 

 excellent crops grown on land that never saw celery before or any 

 other crop. Carrots often follow. Your land must be in pretty 

 good shape for big crops. Of late years we can get the crop but not 

 the quality. The carrots are wormy. There are little maggot, 

 that work through them that look very similar to the onion maggots 

 When we had carrots that were of good quality, our yield would be 

 anywhere from twenty to thirty tons per acre. I bought a man's 

 crop one year and he claimed he had just one acre. I paid him for 

 thirty -five tons, and he had two tons left for feeding purposes. But I 

 believe he stretched his acre. However, I have grown thirty tons 

 myself. About twenty to twenty -five tons is easily possible. I have 

 seen carrots grown on muck that are just as smooth as glass. When 

 washed, they do command high prices. I may speak of the quality 

 for keeping. When I dropped out of the onion deal, I planted carrots 

 quite heavily, and I have stored anywhere from eight to nine thousand 

 bushels in a storage I had erected for onions. I spld my crop one fall 

 at nine dollars a ton in storage. I weighed them in. The market 

 w^as not very high in the earl^^ winter, but in the late spring they 

 moved those carrots — mostly in March — and there was xery little 

 shrinkage. The second year I stored them on my own hook. They 

 went down quite badly. The third year, in the same building, it 

 was almost a failure. I think this rot was caused by some disease 

 started by the steam that the carrots gave off. Every spring I 

 would have to wash the entire building and scrape it. There would 

 be a scum over the entire woodwork on the ceiling, as much as one- 

 eighth inch. I believe that was a disease which affected my carrots 

 when stored in the same place the second year. The place had the 

 best ventilation I could give any building, but you must not force too 

 much air through the building, or they will shrivel. You must store 

 them damp. Unless you have a concrete building or something of 

 that kind, I would not store mam^ years in the same place. Some- 

 thing ought to be done to find whether that scum or mold is in- 

 jurious, and find a remedy. I might say that the average price for 

 carrots when they are good will run from five dollars to nine dollars 

 a ton in the fall. I have sold as high as eighteen dollars a ton through 

 the winter, but it is hard to speculate on what storage carrots are 

 worth. They go as high as two dollars a barrel sometimes in the 



