1899 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
359 
ODD THINGS ABOUT POTATOES. 
A Homemade Planter. 
How It Is Made. —The potato planter shown 
at Fig. 146 has been in use in this neighborhood for 
three years ; as nearly as I can estimate, it has plant¬ 
ed about 1,000 bushels of seed. It cost me 81 50 and 
three days’ time, and works as satisfactorily as a 850 
or 860 machine. An old mowing-machine frame and 
wheels from the fence corner of one neighbor; a 
spring seat, a lifting lever, and several old castings 
from a discarded binder, of another ; a pair of hillers 
from an old wooden-frame, five-tooth cultivator; a 
new Planet Jr. shovel-plow point from the store ; some 
nails, bolts, and a little old lumber, were the materi¬ 
als from which, by the application of a little thought 
and labor, arose that which I now describe. 
The wheels are placed as far apart as I desired the 
rows of potatoes to be, so as to use the wheel mark for 
a guide, avoiding the use of a marker. The shovel 
plow is bolted to a solid 3 x 3 piece about two feet 
long, the other end of which is placed solidly against 
the under side of the tongue, and hinged so that it 
can be raised and lowered by a lever to which the 
point is attached by a chain. The lever is shown just 
in front of the wheel and near the whiffletrees. A 
rude box of three or four bushels’ capacity is built 
between and over the wheels slanting toward the 
seat, so that, as the potatoes are used out of the rear 
end, those remaining will roll toward the operator, 
always keeping within his easy reach. A spout or 
tube, four or five inches square, leads from the rear 
of the box to the furrow behind the plow. 
How It Works. —The operator sits at his ease on 
the spring seat, picking up the potatoes, and drop¬ 
ping them at regular intervals into the spout. A lit¬ 
tle practice will enable him to place them quite 
evenly. I find it works better to take only one piece 
in the hand at a time, dropping in the spout with one 
hand while reaching after a seed-piece with the 
other. The spout is followed by the coverers, which 
leave the ground slightly ridged over the seed; a 
cross-harrowing just before the sprouts begin to show 
leaves the ground level, and in fine condition. 
The front end of the frame to which the coverers 
are attached is hinged to the two rear upright pieces 
which support the box. A lever is beside the seat to 
raise and lower the coverers at the end of the rows. 
The coverer frame should be hung low at the front 
end, and the hillers must be set just the right dis¬ 
tance apart, and at just the right angle ; when prop¬ 
erly arranged, they do their work perfectly. A little 
trouble arose at first, in this respect: One seed-piece, 
when dropped, would stop just where it first touched 
the ground, the next one might roll or jump ahead a 
foot or more, thus making them lie at unequal dis¬ 
tances when dropped evenly in point of time. This 
was overcome by nailing to the front and sides of the 
lower end of the spout a piece of an old rubber boot¬ 
leg which touched the bottom of the furrow. Then 
the seed had to stay right where it dropped. A man 
to drive the team and to raise and lower the plow at 
the ends, another man to feed the machine and oper¬ 
ate the lever which controls the coverers, and a team 
which walks not too rapidly, can mark, furrow, drop, 
and cover five or six acres in a day. The machine 
does not work satisfactorily on hilly land; it will 
work up or down the hill all right, but going sidewise 
it is inclined to slide, especially if planting five or six 
inches deep, as I like to do. e c. Gillette. 
Yates County, N. Y. 
Planting with Mowing Machine. 
A Late Start. —June 16 last, when I commenced 
taking an old mowing machine to pieces, intending to 
make a potato planter, most of my neighbor’s pota¬ 
toes were up and pretty well covering the ground, 
and it looked rather doubtful whether we would have 
any tubers that year or not. I took the axle and two 
wheels of the mowing machine; to the former, I 
bolted an old pair of hay-rake thills, and on to the 
sides of the latter bolted a cross X made of 2x4, 
long enough so that each end would extend beyond 
the rim of the wheel just four inches. These spuds or 
projecting ends were sharpened so that, as the wheels, 
revolved, each spud would punch a nice little hole in 
the ground four or five inches deep. The size of the 
wheels brought these holes just 18 inches apart in 
the row. The wheels were mounted on the axle inside 
of the thills and two feet eight inches apart, with a 
small box between them into which some earth was 
put to weight the machine so that it would travel 
smoothly. Just forward of the box on the cross piece, 
was mounted a telltale marker having a short piece 
of chain attached to it, and arranged to be shifted 
from one side to the other, somewhat similar to the 
marker on a hand seed-drill. 
Rapid. Dropping. —After a very thorough prepara¬ 
tion of the ground in the way of deep plowing and 
many times harrowing, a horse was hitched on, and 
driven back and forth from one side of the field to the 
other, each time following the mark made by the 
chain marker on the machine, thus being enabled to 
cover the entire piece ju6t as quickly as could be done 
with any three-legged marker. We found that the 
potatoes could be dropped into these little holes fully 
four times as fast as they could be into any furrow or 
check-mark, as any one who has done anything of the 
kind knows how hard it is to place them where 
wanted. 
Up to this time, the entire scheme was being worked 
out with the intention of covering the potatoes by 
harrowing, also harrowing a number of times before 
they came up, with a view of keeping ahead of the 
weeds. But on finding our holes not quite deep 
enough to admit of a harrow being put on without 
pulling out some of the seed, the land roller was re¬ 
sorted to, and worked to perfection so far as covering 
A HOMEMADE POTATO PLANTER. Fig. 146. 
was concerned. As I am a firm believer in level cul¬ 
ture, all that was done was to keep the cultivator 
going, no shovelplow being allowed in the field, and 
the weeds were hoed out from around the hills just 
twice. 
A Good Yield. —By this late planting, though 
possibly it is not the best rule to practice generally, 
we avoided all trouble whatever from bugs, and at 
digging time, we got just 465 bushels of fine Rural 
New-Yorker No. 2’s from 1% acre of land, and that 
with no phosphate or manure whatever, it being an 
old berry patch. 
By this process, we found that two men could go 
into the field with machine, horse and potatoes, and 
plant four acres a day with comparative ease. What 
is the sense of plowing out a great furrow nearly 
large enough to bury oneself, when all that is needed 
for the seed potato is a little hole from four to six 
inches deep and two inches in diameter ? 
Wayne County, N. Y. s. g stevens. 
ODD THINGS ABOUT THE SOIL. 
HOW THE TEXTURE OF THE SOIL INFLUENCES THE MOVE¬ 
MENT OF AIR AND WATER. 
What Soils Are. —All soils are made up of bits of 
rock of varying sizes and shapes. When these rock 
grains are large, the soil is open, leachy and sandy in 
character ; but when these grains are very small and 
LARGE AND FINE SOIL GRAINS. Flo. 147. 
separate from one another, then a heavy, close and 
stiff clay soil is usually the result. 
In the sandy or coarse-grained soils, the movements 
of air and of water are relatively rapid, while in the 
fine or heavy clays, the reverse is almost always true. 
The reason why this must be so will be readily under¬ 
stood from Fig. 147. We may regard the ideal soil 
made up of spherical grains of a single size, and were 
this true, the spheres in the engraving represent two 
sorts of packing for grains of three sizes where they 
are brought together as closely as possible. In the 
upper portion of the figure, it will be seen that the 
pores left between the grains are large and four-sided, 
while those formed by the other arrangement in the 
lower part of the figure, are much smaller and only 
three-sided. 
The Smaller Grains. —With the four-sided pores, 
the closest packing possible would leave 47.64 per 
cent of a cubic foot of soil open space, which could be 
occupied by soil water or soil air ; but with the closer 
packing, or three-sided pores, the open space in a 
cubic foot of soil could be only 25 95 per cent. But 
whether the spheres or soil grains are large or small, 
the pore space with each type of arrangement remains 
the sime. 
On the other hand, the ability of the soil to hold 
water, and the rate at which water will percolate 
downward through it, as well as the rate at which 
capillarity can move water upward in the soils, varies 
greatly with the size of the soil grains. It will be 
seen that, in the two squares of largest spheres in the 
figure, there are 16 pores through which water could 
flow downward by gravitation, or rise upward by 
capillarity; while in the squares of next smaller 
spheres, there are 64 pores, and in those of the small¬ 
est spheres, there are 256 pores in the same area. It 
is plain, therefore, that water or air flowing through 
soils of these different sizes of grains would be divided 
into 16 streams in the coarsest for every 64 streams 
in the second, and 256 streams in the fiuest. 
The Waterfiow.— Now, just as water flows with 
less friction through large pipes than it does through 
small ones, it is plain that, when moving through the 
fine soil, it must be very much more retarded than 
when flowing through the coarse-grained ones We 
have found, for example, that when 5,000 cubic centi¬ 
meters of air will flow through a sandy soil in about 
nine hours, it requires nearly 25 days f©r the same 
amount of air to pass through the same volume of a 
fine clay soil under the same pressure ; the same rela¬ 
tion of flow holds for water. It is clear, therefore, 
that a larger share of the water which falls upon the 
sandy soil of a field must drain away downward before 
the next rain comes, than would be the case for the 
field of clay soil. 
Neither is this all; the smaller the diameter of the 
soil grains, the larger is the amount of soil surface in 
a given volume of soil. Since the water is spread out 
in a thin film on the surface of the soil grains, it is 
plain that more water will be held by the soil of 
smallest grains. Again, since the plant food is dis¬ 
solved from the surface of the soil grains, it is plain 
that the larger the soil surface, the faster will the 
plant food be dissolved under like conditions, and this 
is another reason why clayey soils are naturally more 
fertile than sandy ones. F. H king. 
Wisconsin Experiment Station. 
SHORT STORIES. 
Tomatoes. —Tomato plants are usually set out 
about May 20. The seed may be sown broadcast or in 
drills six weeks before being set out. As soon as the 
weather is warm enough, they can go into the cold 
frame, to be hardened before setting. This is an early 
crop, but every farmer or gardener who has sale for 
tomatoes should not fail to make a second sowing of 
seed the last part of April or early in May, to furnish 
plants for a late crop to come in after the early ones 
have become exhausted by continual bearing. Fine 
tomatoes usually bring a good price late in the season, 
and there is also a demand in most places for good- 
sized green fruit for pickling. 
Compressed. Air. —Experiments in the use of com¬ 
pressed air for motive power are progressing rapidly. 
Last week, several street cars in this City were run 
successfully by means of this power. Under each seat 
of the car were packed three long steel tanks or bottles, 
nine inches in diameter, and extending the whole 
length of the car Air was forced into these bottles 
under a powerful pressure, and by means of suitable 
valves, it was let out as required. The car was charged 
so that, with its six bottles, it would run 15 miles 
without recharging. A large and powerful storage 
tank is located at a convenient place, so that the 
bottles may be recharged in two minutes if required. 
It is thought that this system of using a powerful pop¬ 
gun to move the cars will, in time, largely supersede 
both electricity and cables. It is cleaner, less danger¬ 
ous, and on the whole, cheaper. 
Another system of using the compressed air is to 
pipe it from place to place, wherever power is de¬ 
sired. Small motors are being made which may be 
connected with an air pipe so as to develop all the 
way from three-quarters to 10-horse power. These 
motors are so light that they can be carried about 
from place to place, and made to turn almost any 
machinery. In fact, this development of compressed 
air as power, seems to indicate one of the greatest in¬ 
dustrial changes of the world’s history, for it will 
bring power back to the farms and small factories, 
making them largely independent of the great in¬ 
dustrial ventures which have depended upon steam 
for their work. This air power also makes it possible 
to use hundreds of new tools, and it will, undoubtedly, 
take the place of many kinds of labor, which, it had 
been supposed, must always depend upon hand power 
to be effected. 
