SO THE CULTIVATOR. Jan. 
the neighborhood a premium on toads, and placed them 
in my garden, where I have a number still luxuriating 
in an f< otium cuimdignitate.” To them alone I attri¬ 
bute that my roses now exhibit their beauty, and my 
grape-vines their fruit. 
My observation also goes to prove, with Dr. Under¬ 
hill, that rose-bugs breed in the ground. This insect 
came into my garden with some rose bushes from a 
New-York nursery. C. E. 
Sandwich, C. W., 1845. 
EXPERIMENTS IN GROWING- INDIAN CORN. 
Ed. Cultivator —One and a half miles north of this 
village, is an extensive black ash swamp, three miles 
east and west, averaging three-fourths of a mile in 
width. Three years ago, a road was made across the 
width of this swamp, by laying logs crosswise com¬ 
pactly together, and covering them with muck taken 
from ditches, cut three feet deep on each side of this 
causeway. Judge Clark and other proprietors of this 
swamp, cut a ditch six feet wide at top and three deep, 
connecting with the ditches of this road, running east 
IT miles to the termination of the swamp at Black 
Brook. This season Judge Clark tried the experiment 
of growing Indian corn on a field of 1| acres, directly 
at the junction of the road and the main ditch. The 
black ash and elm trees had been cut off three years; a 
few turneps were grown on it the'first season; last sea¬ 
son a crop of potatoes, which were much injured by the 
rot. It was now plowed once as well as the stumpy 
incumbered ground would admit, and planted immedi¬ 
ately after it was plowed, 24th May, with Dutton corn 
in hills three feet each way. Some practical farmers 
predicted that if the season was wet, “ the crop would 
be drowned’-—if dry, “ the muck would dry up and the 
corn wither.” I went over the field early one morning 
after the second hoeing, and the ears had commenced 
forming, in the height of the great drouth of the past 
summer. Instead of finding the soil dry and thirsty, 
the whole loose peaty mass was redolent of moisture. 
It appeared to me that during the past very warm night, 
the hydrogen of the recomposed surface had united with 
the oxygen of the air, thus forming water, by a sort of 
capillary attraction, not less than by chemical affinity. 
Had the surface soil been less porous the union of the ! 
two gases could not have taken place, at least to the | 
same extent. Had not the peaty surface been in a fine I 
state of decomposition, the like result would not have 
been produced, the corn would have been slender, the | 
leaves curled, the farmers’ prediction fulfilled. Had it 
been a wet season the ditches would, by taking off the 
surplus water, have prevented the “ drowning ” of the 
corn; but the decomposition of the peaty mass would 
have been so much retarded, by the absence of solar 
heat, that the farmers’ prediction would have been, in 
effect, fulfilled; less however from the effect of the in¬ 
cumbent water than from the lack of solar heat. The 
surface soil of this swamp is nearly four feet deep, rest¬ 
ing upon a compact silicious clay, of a light grey color; 
this corn yielded 140 bushels of sound ears to the acre, 
with two hoeings. 
EFFECTS OF DROUTH—CARROTS. 
It is a common saying among farmers, that in a dry 
season the soil will suffer the drouth better without 
manure than with it. This assertion can,,only be true 
when the manure is slovenly applied, in a crude and 
undecomposed state. I have noticed that leguminous 
plants grown the past unusually dry season, have had a 
much shorter tap root than those grown in ordinary 
seasons. I gathered white carrots this fall with the 
greatest ease by hand, without fork or spade; many of 
the tap roots were rounded off four or five inches below 
the surface, but the lateral roots were many and long; 
the carrots high out of the ground, many of them three 
inches in diameter, by twelve in length. I attribute 
the phenomena of the rounded tap root to the extreme 
drouth of the season; in default of a moist sub-soil, the 
plant sent its roots laterally to drink the water artificial¬ 
ly supplied by the chemical union of the hydrogen of 
the humus in the soil with the oxogen of the air. 
Petzholdt says that the formation of carbonic acid takes 
place principally at the expense of the oxygen of de¬ 
caying matter—and that the hydrogen from the same 
matter forms water by like union with the oxygen of 
the atmosphere. Liebig says that the quantity of water 
produced by an acre of fresh plowed sward ground 
amounts to 950 lbs. per hour, which equals the evapora¬ 
tion per hour from an acre after copious rains. The 
results in vegetable growth the past unusually warm 
dry summer, go far to corroborate the truth of the above 
views. How else are we to account for the unusual 
large crops produced this season from every well work¬ 
ed field, while the meadow and pasture lands have suf 
fered severely from drouth. 
SALT AS A MANURE. 
E. H. Bartlett, on the east shore of Seneca Lake, in 
the town of Romulus, has this year tried the experiment 
of watering his flax field with a weak brine, soon aftei 
the seed was sown. The result was that the bolls of the 
flax thus treated, contained from 9 to 13 seeds—the un¬ 
salted 5 to 8. 'The drouth of the season undoubtedly 
contributed to this result. A compost of salt, ashes and 
chamberlie, has also proved this season to be an antidote 
to the turnep worm, so common to old soils. 
INDIAN CORN FOR FODDER. 
Mr. B. planted an acre of corn for fodder, 18 inches 
a part one way, 12 the other, three kernels to the hill. 
He got five tons of well cured edible stalks, and fifty- 
four bushels of ears from the acre; the land was never 
manured; it was a clay loam interspersed with granitic 
boulders and quartz and limestone pebbles. 
5 tons stalks worth this year $7 per ton,.$35.00 
54 bushels ears of 8 rowed corn, at 25 cts.,- 13.50 
$48.50 
Deduct cost 1 bushel seed, planting, hoeing, } 
cutting up, husking, stacking stalks and use > 17.44 
of land, ; -— 
Nett profit,. $31.06 
Mr. B. also grew 40 bushels good spring wheat of the 
Labrador variety to the acre this season; it was sown 
in March as soon as the frost was out of the ground. 
S. W. 
Waterloo, Seneca Co., N. Y., Dec., 1845. 
OPERATION OF GYPSUM. 
Liebig supposes the action of gypsum to result from 
its attraction of ammonia from the atmosphere—the 
ammonia supplying plants to which the gypsum had 
been applied, with nitrogen. It is difficult, however, to 
account for all the results of gypsum on this theory. 
For instance, its effects have been seen on clover and 
potatoes, on the same fields where its application to 
wheat and other grains, (the very plants requiring most 
nitrogen,) produced no visible results. We have seen 
it applied on an argillaceous soil at the foot of a granitic 
hill with great benefits, when the same kind of gypsum 
applied at the same time to the same kind of crops, on 
the sides of the hill, produced no effect. 
But whatever may be the principle on which plaster 
operates, its effects in many cases are wonderful. When 
in Connecticut last summer, we saw, on the farm of 
John Boyd, Esq., of Winchester, a striking instance of 
the effects of plaster on potatoes. Four rows of pota¬ 
toes, to which a spoonful of plaster had been applied, 
were at least one-third more forward in their size and 
hight of the tops, and were also a much darker green, 
than others in the same field. The plastered rows were 
in the middle of the field, and excepting the plaster, 
had been treated exactly like the others. What the dif¬ 
ference might have been in the yield of the plastered 
and unplastered rows, we have no means of knowing. 
Mr. Chauncey Chapin, of Springfield, Mass., also 
