272 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER 
April IB 
» 
Part IX. 
Wood Ashes and Bone. 
We have now briefly reviewed the 
various substances that may be used to 
supply the plant food found in wood 
ashes and bone. We have purposely said 
but little about stable manure, except to 
compare the plant food it contains with 
that in other substances. One thing to 
remember is that with the few exceptions 
we have pointed out, the elements of 
plant food are alike in effect. A nitrate 
in stable manure is the same as in nitrate 
of soda, and soluble phosphoric acid is 
the same in clover hay as in dried fish. 
Take last week’s table again : 
Pounds in 100. 
Phos. 
Nitrogen, acid. Potash. 
Nitrate of soda.. 
16 
Sulphate of ammonia.. 
20 
Dried blood. 
14 
Ground bone. 
3 Vs 
20 
Dissolved bone. 
H4 
15 
Dried fish. 
7 
7 
Tankage. 
7 
10 
Cotton-seed meal. 
7 
3 
2 
Basie slag. 
20 
Wood ashes. 
2 
5 Yt 
Dissolved S. C. rock — 
12 
Dissolved boneblaclc.. 
16 
Sulphate of potash. 
50 
Muriate of potash. 
50 
Kainit. 
12‘A 
One ton clover hay. 
41 
8 
44 
One ton stable manure. 
10 
5 
12 
Suppose you can 
buy 
100 pounds 
of 
nitrate of soda for 
$2.2S 
, and that 
the 
same money will buy 150 pounds of tank¬ 
age, 200 pounds of cotton-seed meal, or 
1,600 pounds of stable manure. You can 
see that it is not merely a question of 
figuring, but in order to buy intelligently, 
we must know something about the feed¬ 
ing habits of crops, and the character of 
these fertilizers. A student at Cornell 
told us about a boy who went there for 
a short course in agriculture, and heard 
that clover hay is worth $10 a ton as 
manure. He went home and found that 
all his father could get was $8 a ton for 
such hay. “ Don’t sell it,” said he, “but 
haul it out on the ground and plow it in 
for manure !” Now that boy had only one 
side of the matter. If they were to use 
the clover for manure, what was the use 
of cutting, and curing and hauling it 
under cover ? better have let it rot down 
in the field or, better yet, let hogs or 
cattle eat it down. It may be, too, that 
selling at $8 a ton was the easiest and 
best way to obtain cash with which to 
pay debts and taxes. So you see one 
can’t make such dogmatic statements 
about the fertilizing value of these sub¬ 
stances. That value depends on so many 
different things that unless they are 
well understood, one is liable to use fer¬ 
tilizers at a loss. For example, we have 
a man this week who wants to use a lot 
of lime at the time of using a super¬ 
phosphate. Of course that will mean a 
loss. Then, as you know, we have three 
or more forms of nitrogen more or less 
soluble. All these things must be con¬ 
sidered, and while any good schoolboy 
might figure out the right per cent of 
nitrogen, potash and phosphoric acid 
needed, he might get it wrong unless he 
knew something beyond that. 
The feeding habits of the plant must be 
considered. Take potatoes, wheat, corn, 
strawberries, grass, cabbage, etc. Ob¬ 
serve how they grow, the time they take 
to develop a ci-op, the proportion of stem 
and root to actual edible portion, and you 
will see that they vary in their feeding 
habits almost as much as do animals. 
There are farmers who never husk or 
shell their corn. It is fed, ears and all, 
to the cows. The manure and refuse is 
thrown into the barnyard where the 
hogs root it over and make use of what 
the cows left. The poultry capture what 
the hogs leave, and so it goes on. People 
who feed for the best results, do not 
feed in that way. They have different 
rations and combinations of food for 
horse, cow, sheep, poultry and hog— 
not so much because they could not all 
live on corn and hay alone, but because 
they see that these animals have differ¬ 
ent feeding habits and different work to 
perform, and thus do better with differ¬ 
ent rations. 
For example, take corn and potatoes, 
and observe how they grow. The corn 
is planted late, and grows up from a 
little seed. The proportion of the little 
seed at starting, to the complete stalk 
and ear, is something remarkable. It 
fills the ground with tough, hard roots, 
and it exposes an immense space of leaf 
to the air. Its heaviest growth is made 
during the hottest weather—hot nights 
as you know make fine “ corn weather.’ 
It is the thriftiest and rankest grower of 
all our crops. To make a comparison 
with animals, corn is the hog among 
plants in its feeding habits. While it 
needs soluble and nearby food when 
small, its rank and hearty growth later 
enables it to make good use of refuse 
like coarse manure, sods, coarse bones, 
etc. Other plants will, of course, use 
these rough substances, but not to such 
an extent as corn, which is also the best 
crop to utilize organic forms of nitrogen. 
That is so because, as we saw last week, 
these organic forms require heat as well 
as moisture to break up and become 
available for plants. As corn does its 
most rapid growing during the hot 
weather, naturally it is in the best con¬ 
dition to utilize the result of this nitrifi¬ 
cation in the soil. Thus stable manure, 
sods, cotton-seed meal and other organic 
manures, seem specially adapted to corn, 
cabbage, celery, and other crops that 
make rapid growth during hot weather. 
Here again we see the importance of 
using a quantity of some quickly avail¬ 
able form like nitrate of soda to push 
the little plants along. 
Now, it is evident that the potato plant 
feeds on a very different principle. It 
does not start from a seed, but is really 
a scion such as is used in grafting. It 
does not have anything like the root 
growth of corn, and is a feebler plant in 
every way. Its tubers are made in the 
soil, not above it, and are formed in a 
very short period as compared with the 
growth of the vine itself. There is a 
great difference in producing an ear of 
corn up in the sun, on a stalk, and in 
forming six good tubers at the bottom of 
the stalk—in the soil. We would call 
the potato the milch cow among plants 
as distinct from corn—the hog. We 
would try to feed the two crops with 
something of the same difference that is 
noticed in feeding cows and hogs. That 
is why we advocate the use of manure 
on the corn and give corn the preference 
when a clover sod is used in the rotation. 
We think the corn will the better utilize 
these coarser manures, and that it pays 
better to give the potato crop more solu¬ 
ble food. This is not said to try to prove 
that potatoes cannot be grown on stable 
manure or sod, for we know that they 
can be. Because they are so grown, it 
does not follow that these manures are 
the best for the crop. Here we are sim¬ 
ply discussing what seems the more 
scientific treatment from a study of the 
feeding habits of the crop. 
Without taking too much time with 
this discussion, we will say that straw¬ 
berries, garden truck and similar crops 
that make a very quick and rank growth, 
might be classed as poultry among 
plants. Small grains we would class as 
the horses, and grass as sheep in esti¬ 
mating the feeding habits and necessary 
ratio of plant food. We might carry 
these distinctions further and show how 
oats, for example, differ from buckwheat 
in feeding habits and capacity. We 
make this classification simply to illus¬ 
trate why and how different combina¬ 
tions of nitrogen, phosphoric acid and 
potash, may be needed without regard 
to the chemical analysis of the crop. No 
one would think of using the same quan¬ 
tity of plant food on an acre of straw¬ 
berries that is used on an acre of Timothy 
hay. A ton of hay would take 26 pounds 
of nitrogen, nine of phosphoric acid and 
38 of potash out of the soil, while 3,000 
quarts of strawberries would remove 
only 21 pounds of potash and 15 pounds 
of phosphoric acid. For all that you 
know very well that the strawberries 
need very much more food than the 
Timothy. Or. again, suppose you have a 
field of Timothy hay side by side with one 
of clover, would you fertilize them alike? 
Considering the fact that clover gathers 
nitrogen from the air, while Timothy 
cannot do so, you can easily see that 
ashes alone w ill answer for the clover, 
while ashes and bone are needed by the 
Timothy. 
$U,$ccUanc0U£ PMvrrtis'infl. 
THE HUSCULAR SYSTEM* 
of every weary, 
thin or thin blood¬ 
ed person does its 
work with con¬ 
stant difficultyand 
fatigue. They feel 
“worn,” or tired 
out, “run-down” 
or nervous. 
Feeble people 
who are dyspep¬ 
tic, find that ex¬ 
ercise after a meal 
is sure to cause 
lessened power to 
digest food — be¬ 
cause there is so 
little blood, and 
what there is, is 
carried off from 
the gastric organs 
to the muscles. 
What is needed 
is plenty of blood, 
and that of the 
right kind. Dr. 
Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery makes 
pure, rich blood, and to gain in blood is 
nearly always to gain in wholesome flesh up 
to the healthy standard. 
Every one should have a certain surplus 
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pure blood. To gain and to keep strength 
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Nervous manifestations, such as sleep¬ 
lessness, nervous debility and nervous 
prostration are in nine cases out of ten “ the 
cry of the starved nerves for food.” If you 
feed the nerves on pure rich blood the 
nervous symptoms will cease. It is bad 
practice to put the nerves to sleep with so- 
called celery mixtures, coca compounds or 
malt extracts • what is needed is a blood 
maker. The ‘ Discovery ” is composed of 
vegetable ingredients which have ,an es¬ 
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