Improvement of Sandy Soils«-Rec!aiming a Feat Swamp. 
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formed at all seasons when not frozen $ no 
season is too wet, too late, or too early for 
them. They require no underdraining, and 
the food for vegetables, in whatever shape it 
is added, however crude and indigestible, is 
immediately converted into pabulum for the 
required crop. The amount of corn and rye 
afforded per acre would not satisfy a western 
farmer, and very properly too, but he must 
recollect that his prices seldom exceed one- 
half those obtained at the east, rye and corn 
being worth usually 60 to 90 cents per 
bushel, and the straw and stalks go far to¬ 
wards meeting the costs of cultivation. The 
luxuries also, of good buildings, which are 
always to be had for less than cost, good 
roads, schools, and churches, and all the ac¬ 
companiments of a matured and well ordered 
society are at hand, and are cogent reasons 
for reconciling the reflecting mind to the 
absence of that superabundant fertility which 
so universally characterizes the west. 
Reclaiming a peat swamp. —At no incon¬ 
siderable distance from the theatre of ope¬ 
rations above described, we went to look at 
others scarcely less interesting. On the 
premises of David Lee Child, Esq., we found a 
peat swamp of some 30 acres, of an oval shape, 
having a ditch of sufficient depth through 
its longest diameter to drain off the surplus 
water this kind of soil is so avaricious of 
retaining. An additional ditch around the 
circumference to arrest and conduct off the 
surface water that rushes down from the 
surrounding hills, or silently, beneath its 
surface, steals along in its deleterious course 
through the soil below, will complete the 
architecture of this field. We have then a 
sufficiently dry surface of partially decayed 
vegetable matter reaching to an unknown 
depth, say from 4 to 20 feet. Its extent may 
be judged of from the fact, that after drain¬ 
ing the swamp some 15 years since, the sur¬ 
face has fallen several feet, requiring' the 
outlet to be deepened to carry off the water 
from the subsiding soil. Here, then, we 
have a vast fund of geine, or food for plants, 
for all estimated purposes, perfectly inex¬ 
haustible. The tyro in agriculture would 
say, we have here a boundless fertility, we 
have only to sow, and an abundant crop will 
reward the effort. Try it. Plant your corn, 
and sow your oats, and scatter your grass 
seed, and let us see the result. There it is ; 
the corn about a foot high this 8 th of Au¬ 
gust, looking for all the world* as if it had 
just got up and ashamed of itself and kins¬ 
men, was trying to get back again as quick 
as possible ; the oats thin and meagre, 
scarcely indicating which way they are go ¬ 
ing, whether up or down 5 while the culti¬ 
vated grasses, if they exist at all, are so 
deep in the mire, that the rank wild weeds, 
indigenous to the soil, lord it over them 
so proudly that they scarcely deign to 
notice their poverty-stricken neighbors. 
Rut let us look a little further. Here is corn 
10 feet high, and still spreading with a rank¬ 
ness and luxuriance that would excite the 
envy of the owner of the richest alluvial 
bottom lands. Here are oats, so tall and 
heavy, that but for their denseness, they 
would be a mass of horizontal straw; and 
the clover is only exceeded in height by the 
oats, while, in weight, it is their full match. 
What makes this great contrast, a difference 
as w r ide as between a famine and a surfeit, a 
drought and an inundation! This unsur¬ 
passed fertility has been produced, simply 
by carting or sledding on to the land in win¬ 
ter, 150 loads of gravel to the acre, that exists 
within a few rods on every side of it, at a 
cost of 6 to 10 cents per load. This is all 
that has caused the change, and the same 
operation that has effected a drain from the 
swamp, affords the required material, while 
the ditches which have been made through 
it, of some 4 feet in depth, and tapering 
from 4 feet at top to two at the bottom, 
afford the richest top-dressing for the adja¬ 
cent hill-side of hungry gravel. We saw 
here melons and garden vegetables, potatoes, 
and other roots, growing with a luxuriance 
that a primitive settler of the prairies might 
well envy. 
We are aware that that eminent agricultu¬ 
rist, Mr. Phinney, has found the top dress- 
ing of gravel, sand, or clay, (for they all pro¬ 
duce a similar effect, their chemical cha¬ 
racter not varying materially, though their 
mechanical condition is widely different,) 
has not produced a sufficient effect to con¬ 
tinue these large crops, without the addition 
of a top dressing of some twenty loads of 
compost manure to the acre, when the coarse 
natural grasses have pushed their way among 
the cultivated ones above. A less quantity 
of stable manure carried on, and intimately 
mixed with the gravel and soil, would answer 
the same purpose, and lime and ashes might 
be added with great effect. When once 
thoroughly laid down, these lands will re¬ 
main for years, affording immense crops of 
hay, and whenever turned over for tillage 
crops, will afford the largest yield. Mr. 
Phinney states that 75 bushels of corn, 500 
bushels of potatoes, and 4 to 5 tons of hay 
per acre, are the crops from such land. And so 
