THE FOOD OF VEGETAFLES. 



2S 



it is not in the soil, but as they certainly will if it is there and 

 within their reach. 



Some persons condemn natural manure and extol the so- 

 called aitificial ; others condemn the artificial and extol the 

 natural. I think it is better to do neither, but to discriminate. 

 Ville, the great French chemist, says land to which farmyard 

 manure only is applied, is being gradually exhausted, and that 

 its fertility can be better maintained and crops better fed with 

 the three ingredients — lime, potash, and phosphoric acid in 

 combination with nitrogenous manure. Professor Wrightson 

 says farmyard manure has no equal. Stephens, in his {< Book 

 of the Farm," says a ton of first-class well-made manure should 

 contain between 12 and 14 lbs. of nitrogen, 11 to 15 lbs. of potash, 

 8 to 9 lbs. of soluble salts of phosphoric acid (as in superphos- 

 phate), and 10 to 13 lbs. of insoluble phosphate (as in bones). 

 As these are all the ingredients Ville asks for, and as the 

 manure also acts mechanically in opening the soil, supplying 

 silica, and eventually humus — which is the nursery of Bacteria 

 or micro-organisms, that render the nitrogen active by converting 

 it into nitrates — such a mixture of good things must be long in 

 exhausting the land. It will feed the land and the crops ; but — 

 and here is the point — not one ton of manure in ten thousand 

 equals, or even approaches, the standard named. The bulk of 

 the material that gardeners have to work with does not half 

 equal it, and a vast quantity is but a poor apology for the genuine 

 article — the husk without the kernel, a dead body from which 

 the spirit has gone. 



Then come the value and the need of the concentrated 

 essences known as artificials. Every gardener should have a 

 supply of these, and he may then not only increase the produce of 

 the soil, but improve it — storing the vegetables with food, with- 

 out which, though they may be passable, they cannot be perfect. 

 Phosphoric acid with potash, the former preponderating, for the 

 Brassica family ; potash with phosphates for the Legumes or 

 pod-bearers, also Potatoes ; and nitrogen for every crop that 

 needs a whip on to enable it the more freely and fully to abstract 

 the substantial ingredients. With superphosphate of lime, 

 chloride (or nitrate) of potash, the latter the more potent and 

 costly, also nitrate of soda, or sulphate of ammonia at hand, the 

 gardener can improve his probably poor farmyard manure con- 



