1873 .] 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
3 75 
hills 3i feet apart, it will not be capable of pro¬ 
ducing a good crop when the plants stand as 
thick again in the rows. Why should we ex¬ 
pect it? It is only on clean, dry, rich, land that 
we gain anything by drilling in corn. And the 
same is true, I think, in regard to planting pota¬ 
toes in hills or in drills. If the land is rich 
enough, you can get a larger crop by planting 
in drills. You hare twice the number of potato- 
plants on an acre. But until we have got our 
farms richer and cleaner than most of them are 
at present, I am inclined to think that it is bet¬ 
ter to plant in hills. We can cultivate both 
ways and have a better chance to kill weeds. 
“I am glad to hear you say that,” remarks 
the Deacon; “ but why don’t you practice what 
you preach ? ” 
I do. I am simply anxious not to mislead. 
I shall drill in my corn this year, and plant .my 
potatoes in drills and not in hills. And I con¬ 
tend that in my case this is the better plan. But 
it would not be the best on a great many farms. 
I use corn as a “fallow crop.” I plow up the 
clover sod early in the fall, and in the spring 
plow it once or twice and cultivate and harrow 
thoroughly. I want to start all the weed-seeds. 
Keep plowing, cultivating, harrowing, and 
rolling until the last minute. Then drill in the 
corn as fast as the land can be got ready. If 
you have worked your land thoroughly, and 
made it quite fine and mellow, the weeds will 
be likely to spring up by the million. As soon 
as the weeds begin to start go over the field 
with a Thomas harrow. If one harrowing does 
not pull up and kill the weeds go over it again. 
And as soon as the rows can be distinctly seen, 
put in the cultivator, and follow with the harrow. 
Harrow every three or four days until the corn 
is five or six inches high. It may pull up or 
smother a few hills, but this is nothing in com¬ 
parison with the benefit. Keep the cultivator 
going until the middle or end of July, or even 
into August if any weeds still show themselves. 
In August I would also go over the field with a 
hoe and cut out any weeds that may be growing 
in the rows. 
This plan of cultivating corn will destroy far 
more weeds than an ordinary so-called summer- 
fallow. Last year it gave me not only a capital 
crop of sound corn, but a heavy growth of good 
fodder, and left the land, with the exception of 
one or two patches of thistles, as clean and 
mellow as a garden. And you should recollect 
that the weed-seeds were not buried and kept 
dormant. The weeds were not temporarily 
held in check. They were killed, and will trou¬ 
ble me no more I can excuse a man who has 
recently taken a farm for adopting some tem¬ 
porary expedient for checking weeds, but I have 
little respect for a farmer who deliberately, year 
after year, and as a regular system, practices 
and defends such a course. 
I can sympathize with a farmer who does not 
succeed in killing weeds in his fields, or in get¬ 
ting rid of foot-rot or scab in his sheep ; but I 
have no sort of respect for the man who says 
that the weeds can not be killed, or the foot-rot 
or scab cured. The former simply, it may be, 
fails for want of energy, promptness, and perse¬ 
verance, or from ignorance as to the best meth¬ 
ods; but the latter, while he may be a good 
“practical” sort of man, is an intellectual 
dwarf, and is almost invariably as conceited as 
he is prejudiced and ignorant. 
Of course our flocks will always be liable to 
attacks of fopt-rot and scab, and weeds will 
continue to grow. But the weeds in six iuches 
of surface-soil can all be killed, and the scab 
and foot-rot in a given flock can be cured. • If, 
after we have succeeded in killing all the weeds 
and all the weed-seeds in six inches of surface- 
soil, we plow up an inch or two more land, the 
weed-seeds in this fresh earth will spring up, 
and must be destroyed in the same manner as 
the first; and after you have cured the scab a 
single scabby sheep from an infected flock will 
communicate the disease to your healthy sheep. 
But while this is true, shame to the man 
who says scab and foot-rot can not be cured. 
Several gentlemen have written to me in re¬ 
gard to our Drainage Law. They will find it 
in the Statutes of New York for 1869, chap. 
888, and in the Amended Statutes of New York, 
1871, chap. 303. The law is very crude and 
imperfect, and needs a thorough revision, but it 
has proved very useful. The great point is to 
get good commissioners. 
Where the work is not extensive, the better 
plan is to endeavor to do it by mutual agree¬ 
ment. Call a meeting, and talk the matter over 
in a friendly spirit, and agree to let some one or 
two good men say what proportion of the ex¬ 
pense shall be borne by the different farmers 
interested, according to the extent of land to be 
benefited by the draining. 
If anything, wages are higher this spring 
than ever, and the men more inefficient. They 
seem to realize that it is impossible for them to 
earn their wages, and they do not try ! I am 
inclined to think that farmers will put in 
less corn than for several years past, and that a 
year from this time will find our cribs and gran¬ 
aries comparatively empty. I am not planting 
half as much corn or potatoes as usual. I am 
letting the land lie in grass and clover. 
In this section no crop brings in so much 
money in proportion to the labor as hay. We 
shall have to make a business of growing it. 
On strong, heavy clay land that is not dry 
enough to grow winter wheat it will pay to 
summer-fallow for timothy. Plow the land two 
or three times and get it into good order, and 
sow it to timothy in August. If the work is 
well done we may expect a good crop the next 
year, and a better one the year after. One ad¬ 
vantage of this plan is that only such parts of 
the field that are likely to be benefited need be 
plowed. The remainder of the field may re¬ 
main in grass, either for pasture or for hay. It 
is true we lose the fall pasture, but it will do the 
meadow no harm to let the grass rot on the 
ground. 
“ I tried this plan on one of my meadows,” 
remarks a friend, “and the result was not 
what I expected. There was a patch of thistle 
in the field, and I plowed up the land and sum¬ 
mer-fallowed it, and sowed it to wheat and 
seeded it down. I did not get five bushels of 
wheat per acre”’ 
Very likely. But this is no argument against 
the plan I have recommended.. The land you 
plowed was a sandy knoll—such land as no sen¬ 
sible farmer would think of fallowing for any 
ot her object except to kill weeds. It was a good 
thing to plow it and kill the thistles; but you 
should not have sown it to wheat. You should 
have sown grass-seed alone. If you had done 
this, and had plowed in a good coat of manure, 
the probabilities are you would have had agood 
crop of grass the next year and better the year 
after. It is the rich, clay lands, abounding in 
dormant piant-food, that are most benefited by 
fallowing—not the poor light sands. Fallow 
your clayey and manure your sandy land. 
I had a case in point on my own farm. One 
of my knolls was full of stones, and I plowed 
it repeatedly to get out the stones. The land 
on this knoll was a calcareous loam. It had 
never produced half a crop since it was cleared 
of timber, fifty years ago. Since I plowed it so 
thoroughly and got out the stones it has pro¬ 
duced heavy crops. It is true that the whole 
field had a good dressing of manure. I had 
another knoll, full of stones and thistles, that 
was a light sand, poor as poverty. This I 
treated in the same way, except that the field 
was not manured. On this knoll the wheat 
was so poor as hardly to be worth harvesting. 
The land needed the repeated plowings to 
kill the thistles and to get out the stones, but it 
needed manure also. 
Roots as Manure. 
It has been found that the roots of a good 
crop of red clover left in an acre of land after 
the removal of the crop weigh six thousand 
five hundred and eighty pounds, or from three 
to three and a half tons. The same examina¬ 
tion gave the weigl t of an acre of rye roots at 
thirty-five hundred pounds, and of wheat roots 
at thirty-four hundred pounds. All of this 
matter is of course valuable for the use of such 
crops as may be grown during or after its de¬ 
composition. The well-known superiority of 
clover as a manuring crop, however, is not due 
alone to the greater amount of organic matter, 
taken mainly from the atmosphere, which its 
roots supply, but also to the position in which 
this matter is deposited. The roots reach deeply 
into the soil, and on their decomposition they 
serve to draw moisture from the lower soil, and 
by the decomposition of fertilizing matter to a 
considerable depth they induce the descent of 
the roots of other crops to a point where Ihey 
are much more sure of a supply of moisture 
during dry seasons than they could be if nearer 
the surface. Then again, these deeply pene¬ 
trating roots traverse parts of the subsoil not 
heretofore open to vegetation, and in their de¬ 
composition they produce a chemical effect on 
the inorganic substances that lie along their 
courses, and help to render them, too, service¬ 
able for future crops. 
Dipping Sheep. 
There is given on this page an engraving of 
a tank and appliances for dipping sheep. This 
is an operation that ought to be performed at 
this season on every flock, both sheep and 
lambs. Vermin which infest sheep greatly in¬ 
crease during the winter. Often cutaneous dis¬ 
orders, as scab, have largely spread throughout 
the flock. All these have an injurious if not 
destructive effect on the sheep and their fleeces. 
Dipping in the various solutions in vogue, 
which have been heretofore described in the 
American Agriculturist, destroy the vermin and 
cure skin diseases. The improved condiiion of 
the sheep’s health acts on the growth of the 
wool, which becomes heavier and of more even 
staple. The tank shown in the engraving is a 
water-tight box just large enough to hold the 
sheep. There is a false bottom, perforated 
with a number of holes and suspended bj<- cords, 
on which the sheep is represented as standing. 
The cords are wound on the rollers seen at the 
ends of the tanks. One of the rollers has a 
crank on one end, and each of them has a 
grooved wheel or pulley around which a cord 
