AMEBIC AN AGBI CUE TUBIS T. 
179 
professional desks for their darlings. At the 
same time, this eloquent lawyer, who is so 
in love with agriculture—for which he may 
perhaps really have an honest affection—will 
probably let all his sons follow the fashion, 
and troop after the rest of the flocks of 
Young America, into stores and offices. 
There is, indeed, no probability that there will 
be any check to the tendency city-ward. Rel¬ 
atively, our farming population will decrease. 
The number of consumers will increase 
relatively faster than the producers. Many 
of these consumers will be productive, while 
many of them will swell the rapidly growing 
idle ranks of our city populations. In any 
event, however, farming will be relatively a 
better and better business, year by year; and 
by far the most prosperous and happy of any 
class in the community will be those who 
have been fortunate enough to have been 
bred intelligent, but plain and hardy farmers. 
[Credit Lost. 
NURSERIES USING LIME. 
In the Premium Essay on “ renovating ex¬ 
hausted land,” by Com. J. Ap. C. Jones, re¬ 
ported in the American Farmer, we find the 
following remarks upon manures, which con¬ 
tain several useful practical hints. Mr. 
Jones’s location is in Fairfax Co., Va., and 
his entire practice is perhaps not the best for 
all other localities, but several of the sug¬ 
gestions here made are every where valua¬ 
ble. 
What I have to record under this head, I 
will premise by endeavoring to correct two 
very prevalent errors in regard to lime as a 
manure. 
First then, lime, practically speaking, is 
not of itself a manure, yet at the same time 
no soil, other than alluvial, annually flooded, 
can be certainly fruitful -awA' permanently pro¬ 
ductive, that does not contain a due portion 
of lime in some form or other, to be absorbed 
by the rootlets of plants for the perfection of 
both straw and grain. I have known some 
curious blunders and detriment to the pro¬ 
gress of liming, by the use of lime as amanure 
in comparison with strong putrescent ma¬ 
nures ; for instance, a shovelfullof each was, 
by a novice, put on the hills of alternate rows 
of corn- The result of such ill-judged ex¬ 
periment need not be told. 
Another common error, and one little less 
fatal to the general use of lime as an auxil¬ 
iary renovator, is that it must be applied in 
quantities so large as to interdict its use by 
most farmers who derive support entirely 
from an exhausted soil. I was a great suffer¬ 
er under this popular error. When 1 com¬ 
menced farming, there were but few, if any, 
native periodicals devoted exclusively to Ag¬ 
riculture, and adapted to the wants of our 
country, consequently, we had to look abroad 
for agricultural light, which, when received, 
was illy adapted to our resources, our cli 
mate, or our worn-out lands. 
The English works with which we were 
most familiar, told us of liming by the 1,2,3, 
5, and even 60 bushels per acre ; and in 
Pennsylvania, where liming was first brought 
into much use in the United States, 40,60, 
and 120 bushels per acre were generally ad¬ 
ministered. 
I commenced with about 40 bushels per 
acre, and I have, occasionally, applied 60, 
and as much as 80 bushels, on one occasion. 
The result was highly satisfactory in each 
case, but the expense was entirely beyond 
the means of most farmers. Long experi¬ 
ence and close observation have satisfied me 
that lime, in far smaller quantities than is 
generally supposed, may be applied in vari¬ 
ous ways and with great advantage. I had 
good results and lasting benefits from the 
application of as little as 15, and even down 
to five bushels of freshburned lime per acre, 
mixed with three or four times its bulk of 
■road scrapings, and even of virgin soil dug 
out of banks on the road ^ide, spread on grass 
lands in autumn. Lime thus neutralized by 
clay or earth forms a most valuable ingredi¬ 
ent for making compost; indeed a single 
bushel of lime well mixed witli ashes, dry 
earth and the like, to prepare it for sowing 
by hand, applied to one acre of wheat and 
harrowed in with it, on land destitute of lime, 
will have a very salutary effect in hardening 
the straw and producing well filled heads. 
The mode of applying manures being a 
subject of such diversity of opinion among 
the best farmers, I feel some distrust in re¬ 
cording my own experience. Some plow it 
in as deep as they can, some shovel or har¬ 
row in, and some top-dress by spreading it 
on the surface, and particularly on grass 
lands, and there let it lie ; some do these 
things in the spring-time, some in winter, and 
some at seed-time, and a few, directly after 
harvest or mowing. 
The result of my own experience, after a 
fair trial of all the modes practised or recom¬ 
mended, is that manures should be kept near 
the surface within the reach of air, light, heat 
and moisture. There are some exceptions 
to this general rule, for instance, when rough 
manure is used in the drill (the best mode 
for raising Irish potatoes in the tide-water 
counties of Marylarnd and Virginia,) it must 
be buried deep; so too, when applied to the 
corn crop, it must be spread thick on the sur¬ 
face and deeply turned under. 
This last practice I seldom pursue, now-a- 
days, and for two reasons ; first, the difficulty 
and cost of hauling such a bulky article any 
considerable distance in spring time, before 
the ground has become settled after the al 
ternate freezing and thawing of winter, and 
the great damage done to roads and fields 
traversed at such a season. 
Moreover, I do contend, the opinions of 
many to the contrary notwithstanding, that 
the rough manure of the farm-yard, of a win¬ 
ter’s accumulation, removed in March for the 
corn field, if suffered to remain in the yard, 
occasionally strewing plaster of Paris and 
sulphate of iron, (copperas) over it until more 
thoroughly decomposed by the genial heat 
of spring and early summer, although it 
might lose 50 per cent in bulk, one load of 
the thus concentrated manure would be equal 
as a fertilizer, to four of the rough mass in 
which it was found in March. 
This is a subject of peculiar interest to the 
owners of large farms, say of 500 or more 
acres. Let any one count the cost of ma¬ 
nuring ten acres of land for corn, which ma¬ 
nure to be hauled 1,200 yards from the farm¬ 
yard, in the months of March and April, and 
he will find that he had better sell the extra 
teams he keeps for such hauling, and lay out 
their value in lime and some of the highly 
concentrated manures, than to continue the 
old practice. 
I shall be asked how I expend or apply my 
home-made manures. I will tell you in as 
few words as I can. In the first place, I 
have, as the reader may remember, a stand¬ 
ing farm-yard or eow-pen in which my cattle 
are penned every night, winter and summer. 
The pen is surrounded by stalls for the milk 
cows and work-oxen, while the young and 
dry cattle have shelters under which they 
retire at will. The center of the yard is 
concave, so as to retaiir all liquids that fall 
into it, while there is dry ground around and 
about, forthe cattletostandorliedown. This 
yard is abundantly littered with straw, 
corn-stalks, &c., from early autumn until 
late in the spring. Back of my horse-sta¬ 
bles, there are close receptacles, where the 
horse-litter is deposited, morning and even¬ 
ing. This last manure is applied exclusively 
to top dressing mowing grounds in early 
spring and autumn, but the best time of all 
is as soon after mowing as possible, although 
it be under the burning sun of July, or even 
August. This idea will, doubtless, startle 
many practical farmers, and professors of 
the art and science of farming, as much as it 
did me when first recommended by an emi¬ 
nently successful English farmer still living 
in this State. At first, I thought my friend 
was quizzing me, but he became so earnest, 
and entreated me so hard to try it, if with 
one load only, that I consented, and applied 
it on a piece of fresh-mowed timothy mea-' 
dow, neither high nor low ground, and at 
the rate of only 5 cart-loads per acre. The 
result was a heavy second growth, equal to 
half the first crop, and when, in August, the 
part so dressed might have been mowed, the 
stubble of the undressed portion wa s not hid by 
the after-growth. The crop of the succeed¬ 
ing year was 20 per cent better than on land 
of the same quality top-dressed in the usual 
way and time. 
Traveling in the State of New-Hampshire 
a year or so afterward, on a farm where was 
growing the best timothy I have ever seen 
in New-England, I saw wagons in August, 
hauling cured grass from the meadow to the 
barn, and returning with manure from the 
barn to the meadow! My farm-yard or 
rough manure is applied chiefly to the pota¬ 
to crop, planting at convenient seasons 
through the months of March, April and May. 
The fine manure or scrapings is worked into 
composts and applied to corn in the hills, 
to garden and field crops, such as ruta baga, 
beets, carrots, &c., and to oat and barley 
ground, sowed broad-cast and harrowed in, 
to buckwheat and turnips in July, and to rye 
and wheat at the time of sowing. 
Having said this much about manures of 
the farm-yard, the practical farmer must 
choose his own time and method of using 
them, according to the circumstances in 
which he is placed. 
Of all the concentrated natural and chemi¬ 
cal manures now in general use by farmers 
and gardeners, Peruvian guano is decidedly 
the favorite. It may not always be so. It 
ought not now to be the case. That upon 
extremely poor lands, incapable of vegetable 
production without use of powerful stimu¬ 
lants, 200 lbs. of guano per acre will produce 
an astounding crop of wheat, &c., cannot 
be denied ; and if clover seed be sown with 
the fall crop, or on it, in early spring, a fair 
crop of clover may follow next year, if the 
season be favorable ; and if that clover be 
well plastered and plowed down in June, and 
again plowed and seeded with rye or wheat 
in August or September, there will be an im¬ 
proved base to work on, by a regular rota¬ 
tion such as I have already laid down, which 
must be pursued, or the benefits of the gua¬ 
no will be lost, and the land will be in a 
worse condition than ever. But guano should 
not be applied the second time to the same 
land, unless in combination with other fine 
manures; nor should it ever be applied in its 
crude state to land that is in good heart, i. e., 
land that will bring thirty bushels of Indian 
corn, or 15 bushels of wheat per acre, with¬ 
out it; not but that guano on some such land 
might increase the product of both wheat 
and corn enough to pay for itself, but if it 
should, the soil will be robbed of its fertility, 
and will be left in a far worse condition than 
when the guano was first applied ; at least, 
such have been my own results in its use, 
and such is the universal character of guano 
in Peru, as I there learned upon personal in¬ 
quiry, from the mouths of all persons (with 
whom I conversed) engaged in gardening 
and agricultural pursuits around the city of 
Lima, the capital of Peru, from whence we 
obtain the best guano. I have frequently 
been in Peru, first in 1825, again in 1842-3, 
