172 



THE SOUTHERN PLANTER. 



Catch-water Irrigation, though easy of 

 construction, requires constant supervision, 

 for if the water find for itself the smallest 

 channel, it will soon convert it into a gulley 

 or ravine. Flat bed Irrigation is as appli- 

 cable on a side hill as on a plane of mode- 

 rate inclination. Care, however, must be 

 taken to bend and wind the bed to as mod- 

 erate a lateral inclination as the surface will 

 permit, to execute the lateral grading and 

 side banks with much nicety, and to apply 

 the water in very limited quantities. No 

 sod on a steep side hill can long withstand 

 a strong current of water. 



Irrigation by Absorption 

 Is designed to supply the soil with the defi- 

 cient moisture. It is seldom practiced ex- 

 cept on land under cultivation and recently 

 pulverized. It is very much followed in 

 Italy in the cultivation of rice and grain 

 crops and could no doubt be advantageously 

 introduced in the cultivation of corn upon 

 the sandy flats of tide water. In Egypt it 

 is of more ancient date than the Pyramids 

 and is still there of common usage, as also 

 in Persia and India. From a passage in 

 Isaiah, the Jews seem to have regarded "a 

 garden that hath no water" as a picture of 

 desolation.* If introduced in our garden 

 culture, vegetable famines like that of 1854 

 might be avoided. The practice is very 

 simple. The conductor, (which in garden 

 culture need be not much larger than a 

 water furrow,) is constructed as before di- 

 rected. The land is laid off in beds 5 or 

 10 feet wide, the water furrows graded to a 

 continuous but gentle inclination and stops 

 placed in them 10 or 20 feet apart, according 

 to their rapid or gentle descent. The water 

 is passed from the conductor into the water 

 fnrrows, and absorption and capilliaiy attrac- 

 tion do the rest. 



The beds require no grading, but should 

 not at centre be more ihan one foot higher 

 than at their sides. Irrigation by absorption 

 will not on the same surface consume one- 

 tenth of the water required in Current Irri- 

 gation. The main conductor need not, 

 therefore, be of half the size. 



Irrigation by Flooding 

 Is practiced only on dead levels, or planes, 

 of very gentle inclination. It is an indif- 

 ferent substitute for Current Irrigation and 

 should never be performed when that may 

 be adopted. The whole art consists in sur- 

 rounding the meadow by tight and carefully 



* In the book of Genesis we read, " A river 

 went out of Eden to water the garden." 



built embankments, and providing sluice 

 gates through which the water may be de- 

 livered on or discharged from it, according 

 as it is intended to flood or lay it dry. It 

 may at some future day be found useful in 

 the cultivation of rice, or grass, on our tide 

 water swamps if the problem of reclaiming 

 them, or of appropriating our alluvial wealth 

 below tide water, shall ever be solved. 

 Legislation needed. 

 Irrigation can never be extensively prac- 

 ticed in Virginia, until the privileges, now 

 enjoyed by parties proposing to drain their 

 lands, shall be extended to those intending 

 to construct a water meadow. The head of 

 a conductor, like the tail of a ditch, must 

 be often located in the land of a neighbor- 

 ing proprietor, whose voluntary assent to 

 the entry and appropriation will rarely be 

 obtained. The privileges conferred by chap- 

 ter 124, page 528, Code of Virginia, would 

 seem as necessary in the one case as in the 

 other. The writer would, therefore, in con- 

 clusion, respectfully call to this branch of 

 the subject, the attention ofthe Agricultural 

 Society of Virginia. 



GAPES IN CHICKENS. 



My experience in raising chickens teaches 

 me to keep the hen house clean and regularly 

 swept ; to visit the yard and keep that swept 

 out also for the space of five or six yards around 

 the house, taking care that neither grass or 

 weeds grow there during the year, and to smoke 

 the hen house repeatedly during the summer. 

 As soon as my chickens are hatched in the 

 spring of the year, say March, I begin to smoke 

 my young chickens every morning with strong 

 tobacco smoke until they are almost large enough 

 to fry. My mode of smoking is to have hovels 

 large enough for one or two hens and their 

 broods, not more ; I have a trap door at one end 

 of each hovel, and make the smoke close enough 

 to the door just so as not to burn the hovel, then 

 you will have room in the other part of the 

 hovel not to burn the chickens. So treated, they 

 will never have the gapes. 



Your obedient servant, 



Robert Kent. 



Fluvanna Co. April 2, 1856. 



The above remedy of our correspondent may 

 be. a very good one ; we have never tried it. We 

 have recently heard of another which is said by 

 a lady who raises more chickens than any one 

 we ever heard of to be completely efficacious. 

 It is simply to mix onions or garlick, or wild 

 onions, if the other cannot be had, copiously 

 with their feed. The onions to be finely chopped 

 up. 



