26 
THE CULTIVATOR. 
seed corn, except the labor. Those who cannot afford to 
expend so much labor and money the first season, can 
extend the time over several seasons, applying' say twen¬ 
ty or thirty bushels of lime to the acre, and turning under 
but one crop of corn each year. 
The above may be considered a brief summary of the 
whole argument; and, it seems to me, scarcely requires 
elucidation. Some may however require explanations, 
and I therefore proceed to give them. 
A clay soil requires only sand to make it a good one, 
so far as constitution is concerned; a sandy soil requires 
clay to make it good. These two elements of a good 
soil generally exist on all farms; and wherever they do 
exist in separate places, they should be combined and 
mixed, that the whole may be made fertile. If your land 
be too clayey, and you have no sand on your farm, pro¬ 
bably some neighbor would be glad to exchange some 
of his sand for some of your clay, doing half the hauling, 
and thus both farms will be benefited at half the labor 
each. Rely upon it, there is more to be obtained in the 
improvement of land by a judicious admixture of soils, 
than is generally supposed. Manuring cannot supply its 
place, however large the quantity applied; and when 
once made, the effect is permanent, the benefit perpetual, 
the improvement lasts forever. 
Low wet places are not only unproductive, but they 
are unhealthy, unseemly, and an absolute loss of all the 
land so situated. If your farm consists of one hundred 
acres, and twenty acres of it is of this low and wet kind, 
you have but eighty acres of land. Therefore drain, by 
ditching this low land, make it productive, by adding 
sand, &c.. where necessary, and you will in effect have 
added twenty acres to your farm. And in draining, take 
care to avail yourself of the advantages of blind ditches. 
I do not suppose it necessary to tell you how to make 
them—the way may be found in almost all agricultural 
works, and they are very simple. A summary of the dif¬ 
ferent plans may be stated as follows. Dig the trench as 
in the usual way of making an open ditch, of the proper 
depth and capacity, to carry off the water. Then lay in 
the bottom of the ditch, stones loosely packed, so that 
water will freely pass between them, about a foot deep. 
Then lay upon these loose stones, larger and flat ones, to 
Keep the earth from filling the interstices, and then re¬ 
turn the earth thrown out, leveling the whole surface. 
Some, instead of stone, lay in the bottom of the ditch, 
branches and limbs of trees and shrubs, and cover these 
with earth; but such blind ditches are obviously subject 
to obstruction from the decay of the wood, and thence 
from the caving in of the supei-incumbent earth. Others, 
in Europe especially, use an arching of tiles in the ditch 
instead of stones or brushwood; but this is too expensive 
for this country as yet. Where stones can be had, a good 
blind ditch may be made permanently effective by their 
use; next to stone, brushwood is to be preferred. 
It surely cannot be necessary to say a word in illustra¬ 
tion of the grubbing up of all useless growths of bushes, 
trees, &c. Never allow your fences to be sheltered by 
bushes or trees of any kind; they rot the timber, and you 
lose all the land they occupy. “Head lands,” as they 
are called, are just so much deducted from your measure 
of acres. Clear out all such. If you have no other clean 
place in your field, let the head lands and fence corners 
be clean. 
In ascertaining the precise quality of the soil, you ac¬ 
complish precisely what every other artisan does when 
he ascertains his ability to do a certain job. You find out 
what the materials you are to work upon are capable of 
producing. If in that examination, you find your mate¬ 
rials deficient in any one necessary ingredient—lime, for 
example—you, as other artisans would necessarily and 
instinctively do, apply lime. If you find it deficient in 
vegetable fibre, &c., you apply that substance, and if you 
find it deficient in clay or sand, as either of these pre¬ 
ponderate, you apply the one or the other, as the result 
of the examination shall indicate. 
Having prepared the soil for the reception of manure, 
the cheapest and most efficient method and material for 
supplying nutritious principles to the soil, is the next 
matter for consideration. I believe that corn sown broad¬ 
cast, as above directed, is the cheapest, most efficient and 
speediest fertilizer. Some, and very many, suppose Hat 
the old plan of clover laying is the best and cheapest. I 
differ with them. You can only turn under a crop of 
clover once in two years; you can by an effort turn under 
three crops of corn in one year; and I believe that etch 
crop of corn will carry as much nutritious matter into lie 
soil as each crop of clover can do. 
Now in this system of improvement, you have only to 
purchase the lime, if that be necessary; you can raise the 
seed corn on some part of the farm. All the rest of the' 
improvement is derived from labor. 
Never undertake the improvement of more land Dan 
you are certain you can manage. If you expend your 
funds upon too large a surface, you will be likely to lose 
the whole advantage of them. Calculate how much land 
you can work well, and confine yourself to that and no 
more. And in all your operations in agriculture, take 
care not to undertake too much. Suppose you can only 
work ten acres well in one year, if you undertake twen¬ 
ty acres, some of it will have injustice done it, and the 
result is obvious. 
Deep plowing is one of the most efficient agents in the 
improvement of soils, as it is in the continuation of good 
jsoils. Never omit it. It may pay you scantily for a year 
[or two: but it will ultimately repay you an hundred fold. 
(Without it there cannot be any continued successful farm¬ 
ing, no matter what the original soil may have been. 
Discard all shallow working plows from your farm, ex¬ 
cept the mere seed and cultivator plows. 
Some lands will be benefited by 50 bushels of lime to 
the acre, and by it be rendered sufficiently calcareous; 
others may require 100 bushels; all this is to be found 
lout only by proper experiments, as above indicated. If 
(the solution of the soil foams freely in the vinegar or 
jmuriatic acid, it wants no lime; if but partially, it wants 
probably 50 bushels to the acre; if not at all, it may re¬ 
quire an hundred bushels. If it be a red clayey soil, it 
wants more lime than if it be white or blue or yellow. 
! If you have no lime, and wood ashes are at hand, you 
'may accomplish all the objects you aim at by their appli- 
|cation. As ashes are mostly composed of different kinds 
jof lime, besides their more soluble potash, from 50 to 
100 bushels of ashes to the acre, applied in the same man¬ 
ner as directed for lime, will have the same effect as lime, 
besides giving you the advantage of the potash, the first 
year. 
Where neither lime nor ashes are to be obtained, Plas¬ 
ter of Paris, as it is called, may be applied to most lands 
with advantage. The action of plaster continues to be a 
subject of dispute. My opinion is, that it simply serves 
the purpose of fixing the ammonia floating in the atmos¬ 
phere, and that evolved from decaying animal matters, 
and thus securing it to the uses of the soil. No matter 
what its mode of action is, however, it cei’tainly is a ve¬ 
ry efficient agent in soils generally, and in the absence of 
other still more effective agents, it should always be used, 
or at least tried. 
I have said nothing of fencing, the most expensive item 
of farming, because it has nothing to do with the main 
object of this paper, and because the cheapest fence is 
that which each locality can afford with the greatest fa¬ 
cility. One farmer can build a stone fence all around his 
farm, easier than he can a rail fence, simply because he 
has too many stones on his land, and in getting rid of them 
he hauls them to the line where he intends to make his 
fence, and in the seasons when he cannot be more profit¬ 
ably employed, he erects the wall. In the absence of 
stone, and where timber is plenty, the rail fence, the post 
and rail, &c., will of course be the cheapest fencing. I 
have no favorable opinion of hedges, except in the ab¬ 
solute absence of both stone and timber. They require a 
long time to grow; and in this country there is not a sin¬ 
gle kind of hedge plant that has succeeded satisfactorily. 
There are a few instances of good hedges being made, 
but I fvill venture to say there is not one in the United 
States that can be imitated profitably as to cost, time, and 
efficiency. If nothing but live fences had ever been in 
use, and some inventive genius had discovered the use 
of artificial fencing with rails and stone, he would have 
been considered the benefactor of his age. For myself, 
though I have traveled much, and have extended my ob 
