VoL. II. 
AUGUSTA, GA,, SEPTE.IIBER 4, 1844. No. 18. 
From the N. E. Farmer. 
THRIFTY A^ND UNTHRIFTY FARMING. 
Friend Breck — I recently made an excur- 
sion ot some distance in the country, and tarried 
for a shoit lime in a iai’niingcommunity, where 
the first eighteen or twenty years of ray early 
days were spent. Many years have elapsed 
since, and other pursuits have engrossed my 
time and attention. Yet, often my mind reverts 
to the scenes of youth, and memory rolls back 
the recollections of other days, when, in com- 
mon with all the rural community in which I 
resided, 1 felt all the joyous ^hope of seed-time, 
entered with zeal into all the labors and excite- 
ment of haymaking and harvest, and shared in 
all the frolic and glee of husking parties ; and in 
all the thoughtlessness and buoyancy of youth, 
looked forward for thanksgiving, asthe very best 
of all the days in the year. 
In visiting the place, after an absence oftwen- 
ty or more years, I found many striking changes 
had taken place : many an honest, brawny- 
limbed farmer, then lord of his broad acres, now 
occupies but his six feet by Iwo, in the “auld 
kirk yard;” and others that were then in the vi- 
gor of manhood, and had been spared, were 
bowed down with age, and their thick locks had 
been plucked by the fingers of time, or silvered 
o’er by the frosts of 70 or 80 winders. Many ot 
my schoolmates who were then wild and reck- 
]e.ss youths, with whom I had an hundred times 
tried the “ tug of war” at long hold an 1 side hug, 
were now staid and steady farmers — heads of 
families engaged in all the- business scenes of 
life. And of the bright-eyed, flaxen-haired lass- 
es, many were transformed to sober and careful 
housewives and mothers— and others w.ere qui- 
etly sleeping the slumber that knows no awake- 
ning, most of whom had been carried off in all 
the bloom of youth and early womanhood, by 
that scourge of New England — consumption. 
But as the whole country was covered with 
snow, I could not make much of an agricultural 
survey; but upon inquiry, I learned that many 
farms had, from bad management and culture, 
very much deteriorated, and greatly lessened in 
value ; others had held on the even tenor of their 
•way, and wintered about the same number of 
cattle they did formerly, and some few in xhe 
hands of enterprising, intelligent farmers, v/ere 
advancing with a sure and steady pace, that 
•would yearly add to their value, and to the 
•wealth ol their owners. 
There had been several causes in operation to 
exhaust the first named class of farms— such as 
plowing the lands in the autumn, where much 
of the finer portion of the soil was biown off by 
the winds, and washed by the rains and melting 
snows, and suffering their cattle to roam over 
their mowing fields, both fall and spring, with a 
reckless waste of their manure. 
In conversation with one of those farmers, fa 
Mr. G.,) whose farm had run backwards, I sug- 
gested to him the idea ot collecting the leaves 
and decaying vegetable matter from a piece ot 
woodland near by. “ Why,” says he, “ 1 haint 
much opinion of this vegetable matter— ’tis sour 
stufi; only give me dung enough from the hovel 
windows, and I can raise as good crops as Mr. 
I. does, with all his swamp muck, lime, compost 
and book-farming.” I inquired if he took an 
agricultural paper. “ No,” said he — ‘‘ I did take 
one several years ago, and that had so much to 
fell about a new kind of potato, that they sold for 
twenty-five cents a pound, and after all, it warnt 
no better than the long reds; and about tree corn 
and mulberry trees ; and a good many farmers 
got bit, by believing their great stories, that I 
got sick of, and stopped it, and would not now 
take the gift of one.” 
I afterwaids called upon Mr. i., the ” book- 
farmer,” as Mr. G. sneeringly called him, and 
found him a middle-aged, intelligent farmer, 
who was quietly improving his farm by every 
means within his reach. I was so much inte- 
rested in his management, that I thought f 
would attempt to communicate an account of it 
to the public, through the columns of your use- 
ful journal, with the hope that otber farmers 
might be benefiited by his example. 
Upon looking into his barn, I found his hovel 
floors were water-tight, and sloping toward the 
back side. In the rear of the catlie, was a kind 
of trough of the width ot 12 or 15 inches, made 
by sinking one of the floor-planks two inches ; 
this was also water-tight: the droppings from 
the cattle mostly fell into the trough, and by giv- 
ing the cattle a good bedding ot litter ev'-'^-y 
night, they were kept comfortable, and nearly 
as clean as when at pasture. He had the past 
winter used several loads of saw dust from a 
shingle mill, and leather shavings from the cur- 
rier’s, for the purpose of bedding, and soaking 
up the urine. The hovels were daily cleared 
out by wheeling the manure and litter into the 
centre of the yard, (which is dishing,) and piling 
it up in a snug heap. His barn is so situated 
he cannot dig a cellar under it, but intends the 
coming season to build a shed for the purpose 
of keeping his manure under cover for the fu- 
ture. The fioors of his horse-stable are tight; 
every day it is cleared, and the manure and lit- 
ter is spread under a shed, and by being trodden 
by his stock, it does not heat and fire-fang, as is 
too often the case. Most of his winter manure 
will be mixed with swamp mud, to compost 
through the summer. I inquired respecting a 
heap near his barn: he said there were two 
cart-loads of lime-mortai, that he bought for a 
trifle, of a man who had taken down a large 
house ; it was mixed with about four loads of 
brake-root turf, about 18 months ago ; it had 
been left this length of time for the purpose ot 
having the plaster come to pieces, and rotting 
the turf. Last fall it was shovelled over, and 
two lime casks of fleshings, procured at the tan- 
ner’s, mixed with it. He thought while this 
animal matter was decomposing there would be 
a large amount of nitrogen generated, and give 
him a large amount of nitrate of lime by spring, 
when it would be again shovelled over, and 35 
bushels of good ashes mixed, and then applied 
to an acre and a half of ground, upon which he 
should sow w'heat: I think he said the compost 
was to be put on after the ground was plowed, 
and to be harrowed in with the wheat. The 
ashes he had purchased at ten cents per bushel 
He had a cartload of the waste wool, or fly- 
ings, from the wmol carder’s ; this was to be 
boiled for a short time in lye, to cleanse the oil 
and grease, and to render the wool more decom- 
posable. Byway of experiment, apart of it 
would be used to manure some of his corn and 
potatoes in the hill, the rest would be mixed in 
the compost heap, to remain a year or so. He 
also had a large quantity of old woollen rags, 
that he bought of a store keeper fora trifle — 
having, he said, read in some book, that 100 lbs. 
of woollen rags contained as much nitrogen as 
3000 lbs. of cow manure. Some ot these rags 
were to be chopped up and steeped im urine for 
a few days, then to be partially dried and sprin- 
kled with gypsum, and used as manure in the 
corn and potato hills; the other part -v’ould, 
like the waste w'ool, be composted. He had a 
number of casks ol fleshings that were obtained 
at the tanners, which would be mixed with ve- 
getable mould as soon as the snow was off, and 
he could obtain it; he has also taken the hair, 
lime, and piths of horns from the tan-yard; the 
bones are broken up by the hammer and mixed 
with manure and plowed in; they will slowly 
decompose, and supply phosphate of lime to his 
land; he had about two barrels of the settlings 
of salts from the pearlash factory — similar, he 
thought, to the material known as glass factory 
manure: an account of its use and value is 
given in Mr. Colman’s Fourth Report, pages 
344-5, by a Mr. Jarvis. There were a few in- 
ches of lye upon the top cf the salts in the bar- 
rels, so strong as to float an egg with nearly one 
half its surface above the lye. This, he assu- 
red me, according to Mr. Jarvis’s statement, 
would convert 10 or 15 loads of loam or muck 
into a compost equal to the same amount of 
good stable manure. All these materials, saw- 
dust, wool, fleshings, hair, lime, piths of horns, 
and salts from the potash, he had for remo'/ing, 
as they were considered a nuisance, and of no 
value by the manufacturers or owners. The 
droppings of the fowls are occasionally scraped 
from the boards, o^imr w'hich the hens roosted, 
and put in old casks; in the spring it will be 
moistened with urine and ground to pieces with 
a hoe, and mixed w’ith plaster of Paris, to be ap» 
plied to grass land, or put about the corn an 
potato hills, at the first or second hoeing; he 
styles it “Yankee guano.” He has a strong 
tight box under his back house, in which is fre- 
quently thrown gypsum, or charcoal dust ob- 
tained from the coal-pen of the village black- 
smith: it absorbs the smell, and once in a week 
or two, the contents of the box are mixed with 
dry peat or sawdust, or some other material, to 
absorb the liquid part, and put into old tight bar^ 
rels. This is home-manufactured poudrette. 
His hog yard is of good size, has been dug to 
the depth of 18 inches, and a good plank floor 
over the whole, w’hich makes it easy shovelling 
out the manure. The suds from the wash are 
conveyed to it by a spout, which, with the ma’ 
nun- of his hogs mixed with the loam, muck, 
and other materials, make many loads of vege- 
table manure. He has tried many experiments 
that he has seen recommended in the agricultu- 
ral books and papers that he has read; he says, 
after he became one and twentj’', he did not feel 
obliged in all things to follow in the “footsteps 
of his worthy predecessor,” his father, and some- 
times pursued a new track, and went upon his 
own hook. He inten Is getting a small quanti- 
ty of guano and ground bones the coming spring, 
for the purpose of testing them by the side of 
other manures. Several of the kinds he has not 
yet tried, but from his remarks, I feel satisfied 
he will find them all invaluable helps for in- 
creasing his crops.-, and from the nature of some 
of them, valuable and permanent improvers ot 
his soils. 
Salem, April, 1844. 
O^Purple cabbages, the heads not large, bat 
fine and firm, are best for pickling. 
