THE RURAL MEW-YORREfl. 
bly Le plowed in the Fall, deeply if previous 
plowinga have been shallow, bnt rarely more 
than five or six inches. And where corn fol¬ 
lows corn, as the too common custom is, where 
possible, the corn should be husked, the stalks 
broken down and turned under in the Fall or 
Winter months, because, over and above the 
advantage of doing Spring work in advance 
and removing part of the small pressure on 
the seed-time season, turning under stubbles 
or awards of any and all kinds allows of that 
decomposition tind decay to take place, and 
time for that actiou and reaction in the raw 
materials for plant food, which are essential 
to full crops sown on the best soils. So in the 
case of where manures and fertilizers are to be 
used, these should be put upon the laud some 
months before the crop is planted. This is a 
new but a clearly demonstrable view of the 
true use of manures as fertilizers. If the plow¬ 
ing of corn stubble is deferred till Spring, be¬ 
cause of the lateness of the corn harvest, care 
should be taken to break the stubbles off even 
with the ground while it is vet hard frozen, 
using a 15 or 20 foot bar of railroad iron for 
the purpose, managed with a pair of horses 
attached to either end. The stalks should then 
be raked into rows and burned, though the 
better practice is to turn the stalks under 
by the three-horse sulky or the ltiiuch 
common plow; because, though the depth of 
the furrow necessary to cover the stubble 
would probably lessen the crop immediately 
following, the addition of the vegetable mat¬ 
ter will benefit the land over and above the 
loss on the current year’s crop. Spring plow¬ 
ing should also be done as early as possible, iu 
order to have the soil lay and be compacted, 
as well as to admit of a partial preparation of 
these crude elements of plant food which have 
been turned under, and which, until they find 
their way back near the surface, are out of the 
way of the feeding roots. There never was a 
greater error than the common practice which 
demands that corn aDd wheat land should be 
Beeded immediately after being turned up with 
the plow, the assumption being that seeds ger¬ 
minate best when placed in an open, porous, 
cool and fresh seed bed. 
Planting and Seed.— Seeding time having 
arrived, which varies from the 15th of April 
to the 10th of May for latitude 40 deg. the corn 
crop land should be entered upon and given a 
thorough going over with a double shovel, or 
better with a heavy, long and sharp-toothed 
harrow, in order to destroy the weeds which 
start early and to prepare a fine and tilthy 
seed-bed; but in no case should the soil be dis¬ 
turbed to a greater depth than three or four in¬ 
ches. For doing this work the new revolving 
disk-harrow, answers an excellent pnrpose, 
which drawn by three or four stout mules or 
horses, hitched abreast, will cut a furrow from 
twelve to fifteen feet wide and go over from 
20 to 25 acres in a day. And let it be repealed 
here as an essential thing, that in doing the 
second plowing, stirring or fining of the fal¬ 
low, no attempt should be made to turn the 
surface under; because in the case of fail 
plowed land the elements of plant food are 
just where they are needed, and in ihe case 
of spring plowed, the three or four weeks, in¬ 
tervening between plowing and seeding have 
allowed the same fertilizing causes to oper¬ 
ate in a less measure. 
The surface having been fined the land is now 
ready for the seed which should be drilled in 
with the common planter, the rows standing 
apart three feet eight inches to four feet, and 
the stalks singly, in the row distance from 
eight to twelve inches, according to the va¬ 
riety of corn, the strength ot the land, and the 
purposes for which the crop is to be used. If 
the land is foul and rows both ways are needed, 
so as to admit of cultivation in transverse di¬ 
rections, the hills should stand from three 
and a half feet to four and with not less than 
two nor more than three stalks in a hill. 
Where corn is grown to be fed from the 
shock and small ears and an Increased amount 
of forage is desirable, the distance between 
the rows and the hills both may be considerably 
lessoned. The two great errors in this por¬ 
tion of the work of maturing the com crop, 
and they are uot, these alone, but these are 
vices, are in the first place, deferring the time 
of seeding one or two weeks, and second, the 
use of too much seed. The first arises from 
the bad habit of Spring plowing, which fre¬ 
quently does not admit of the land being en¬ 
tered upon till lute in the season, and the sec¬ 
ond from a want of faith in the seed. Given 
Fall plowing, early seeding, and perfectly 
6 onnd seed and land having complete natural 
or artificial draining, the corn crop of the black 
soil counties has never been known to fail. 
But In this connection aud in so vital a mat¬ 
ter, the subject of seed corn deserves some at¬ 
tention. Oae peculiarity of seed corn is (and 
probably the same is true of most seeds), that 
a given lot may be sound enough and good 
enough to germinate to the last kernol, when 
all the conditions are favorable—heat, mois¬ 
ture and the like—and fall to grow when the 
conditions are of an opposite character. 
Thoroughly good aud sound seed will, if 
planted a little too early, or when the earth is 
-• 
too cold, or too dry, or too wet, 
retain its vitality and start when 
the conditions have become fa¬ 
vorable. Such seed corn is only 
readily obtainable In good corn 
ripening seasons, unless care is 
taken to select the ears from the 
field before sharp frosts come, 
truss them up by the husks and 
suspend them where it is airy, 
warm and dry—and the dryer and 
warmer the better—provided the 
temperature does not get above 
125 or 130 degrees, because it has 
been demonstrated again and 
again that no common treatment 
preserves or perhaps develops the 
vitality of the seed corn germ like 
long exposure to a high and dry 
temperature. While it is a com¬ 
mon thing for wheat aud oats 
exposed on the ground during the 
Winter months to make a volun¬ 
teer growth in the Spring, corn 
does so not oftener than once in 
four or five years, that is, in very 
favorable corn crop years, which 
in the afterpart are always sea¬ 
sons of considerable heat and 
drought. 
Planting having been accom¬ 
plished if the season is droughty, 
the soil dry and inclined to be 
cloddy, the corn field should have 
a heavy roller put over it, al¬ 
though the nest corn planters, 
like the best wheat drills, pack 
the 6oll over the seed. After 
rolling, or as soon as the spring¬ 
ing corn shows along the fur¬ 
rows, the field should be thor¬ 
oughly harrowed in both direc¬ 
tions, which no fear of injuring 
ihe springing corn should pre¬ 
vent. Indeed, no matter how 
heavy the harrow may be, if the 
teeth are only slim and sharp, 
the field may be gone over half 
a dozen times without displacing 
one shoot or one kernel in a 
thousand. In case the land is 
dry, the roller should follow the 
harrow, and just as soon as- the 
stand is fairly lull, the plow 
should be set'again and kept going 
till the weeds are subdued, or until 
the corn growth so shades the soil 
that ordinary weeds will not inter¬ 
fere with the crop. 
As to shallow or deep cultiva¬ 
tion, to the number of plowings 
to be given, the instruments to be 
used, and a variety of other mat¬ 
ters, these depend on circum¬ 
stances quite as varied. If the 
season is a warm and moist one, 
any amount of cultivation in al- 
l most any form will benefit the 
crop, but if moist and cool, noth¬ 
ing should be done which invites 
) late growth, and cultivation after 
\ midsummer should be avoided, 
j Where a drouth is approaching, 
L continued shallow cultivation is 
3 desirable, but never deep plowing 
4 in very hot and dry weather, be- 
| cause deep cultivation in a hot and 
* dry time produces disaster by 
f firing the crop. The essential 
thing for a good corn crop beiug a 
^ rich, fctri ng, clean soil, a mellow 
! J) seed-bed, agoodstaud aud an early 
« start, any kind of cultivation 
j? which will leave to the crop the 
I? monopoly of the land will do as 
well as any other one. 
[The Rural New Yorker hastheproof thatit 
has hem offered and that it refused $15 00 per 
bushel for the yield of one of the wheats which 
were originated on (he Rural Harm. This is one 
of the kinds of seeds which ice propose to offer in 
our f uture Free. Seed and Plant Distributions.] 
SOME EXPERIMENTS IN DEEP PLOWING 
FOR CORN. 
C E. TIIORNE 
The following is a statement of some of the 
results obtained from a series of experiments 
in deep plowing for corn, made on the farm 
of the Ohio State University dnring the sea¬ 
sons of 1878 '79 and ’80. Deep plowing, 
however, is hardly the proper term to use, as 
in these experiments we have not succeeded 
in disturbing more than twelve or thirteen 
inches of the soil, for want of tools adapted to 
the pnrpose. 
CHESTER CO. MAMMOTH CORN PLANT.— FIG. 3. 
The soil in which the experiments were 
made is a rich alluvium, largely composed of 
the disintegrated rocks of the Huron shale, 
and resting, in most places, upon a sub¬ 
stratum of gravel, which gives the most per¬ 
fect drainage. It is such a soil, in short, as 
the black walnut and sugar-tree delight in, 
but It has been continuously cropped for 
many years, with little or no manuring. It 
was supposed that a soil of this character 
would be found sufficiently weathered for the 
purposes of crop production to a considerable 
depth, aud therefore two methods of deepen¬ 
ing the tilth were tried in preparing for the 
crop of 1S7S: 
(l.) Two strips, in different fields, were 
plowed to the depth ot thirteen Inches, by 
first turning eight inches of the surface with 
an ordinary plow, and ihen 6tlrring five inches 
of the subsoil with a subsoiler; tbe land on 
either side of each strip being plowed eight 
inches deep with the ordinary plow. 
CULTIVATOR USED IN THE CORN FIELDS OF THE RURAL FARM.—FIG. 4. 
With these essentials attended to 
the corn crop of the blick soil 
prairie yields from 30 bushels in 
bad season to 50 in average, or 75 
to SO in good, the rainfall and the 
The crop yielded as follows: 
Per acre. 
strip (a), anbiolled, at the rate of -h it bus. (shelled) 
Ad Join ini? strips “ 61.07 " ** 
Strip (b), eulmoiled. ** 4;«.23 “ " 
Adjoining strips, “ 65.37 “ " 
Evidently our suhsoilmg did not pay. 
temperature beiog an Important (2.) In a third field, a part of which had 
Chester co,, mammoth. factor In the outcomo of crops, as been in meadow and pasture for many years, 
an average of the bbst EARS, — via. 2. well in Illinois as elsewhere. while the remainder had been devoted to grain 
