1874] 
15 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
winter over.”—That is right. A fat chicken at 
ten cents and a pound of pork at four cents 
would not be a bad dinner after a few hours 
sharp work on a frosty morning. 
“ Steers are selling for 2c. to 2-J-c. per pound 
live weight; but,” he adds, “I am sorry to say 
there are very few to call fat.”—What is need¬ 
ed is a Shorthorn bull. 
W. C. Cusick, of Oregon, sends me by mail 
four pounds of Chili Club wheat. It is a hand¬ 
some white wheat. It is usually grown as a 
spring wheat in eastern Oregon, but is often 
grown as a fall wheat in western Oregon. It 
came too late for me to sow last fall, and I 
have had poor success in raising spring wheat 
here. Mr. C. adds: “ Farming is generally car¬ 
ried on here (eastern Oregon) in a slovenly 
manner. Grain all sown in the spring, as the 
ground is usually too dry to 1 bring it up ’ in 
the fall. It is harvested with ‘ headers,’ which 
leave all the weed-seeds on the ground. Conse¬ 
quently farms are running down. Land that 
produced 100 bushels of barley per acre ten 
years ago will now hardly produce 25 bushels.” 
—This is the same old story. We must kill 
the weeds or give up all hopes of raisiug large 
crops of grain. 
“ J. H. M.,” of Aaronsburg, Centre Co., Pa., 
writes that the general rotation in his neigh¬ 
borhood is: (1st) Corn on clover sod; (2d) oats; 
(3d) after the oats are harvested 12 tons cf well- 
rotted manure per acre are spread on the oat- 
stubble and plowed in. After the oats come 
up the land is either plowed again or thor¬ 
oughly cultivated, and is then drilled in with 
winter wheat. One quart of timothy seed per 
acre is sown in the fall and live quarts of clover 
in the spring on the wheat. The hay crop 
averages two tons per acre; corn, 90 bushels 
of ears; oats, 35 to 60 bushels; wheat, 20 to 30 
bushels. Mr. M. asks if it would not be a good 
plan to fallow the land after corn instead of 
sowing oats. Put the manure on the fallow 
and sow wheat. Then sow wheat again the 
next fall.—As a rule I do not like the idea of 
sowing wheat after wheat. If the land is 
heavy and the oat crop uncertain, the plan of 
fallowing instead of sowing oats is a good one. 
But I would seed down with the wheat. And 
then, the next year or, still better, the year 
after, plow up the clover sod and sow wheat, 
seeding it down again in the spring. Or, what 
would suit me better, I would plow up the 
clover sod in July, August, or September, as 
most convenient, and “fall-fallow” it. And 
the next spring I would sow it to oats and peas 
mixed together, or to oats or peas alone, or to 
barley, and follow this crop with wheat and 
seed down again with clover in the spring. 
“ Does a crop of com,” asks a scientific 
friend, “ impoverish the soil more than a crop 
of corn grown only for fodder and not allowed 
to go to seed ? ” 
It is the general impression that such is the 
case; but I think there is little or no evidence 
to sustain the impression. It is thought that 
the production of seed draws heavily on the 
land. My own opinion is that the seed is ela¬ 
borated from matter previously formed in the 
plant. It is the quantity of plant-food abstract¬ 
ed from the soil that impoverishes it; and, ac¬ 
cording to this idea, it would make very little 
difference whether this plant-food was concen¬ 
trated into fruit or seed, or whether it remained 
in the leaves and stems of the plant. In other 
words, a crop of oats cut for hay or green fod¬ 
der a week or ten days before the seed was 
matured would impoverish the soil nearly or 
quite as much as if the crop was allowed to 
fully mature the seed. 
When we allow a crop of timothy hay to get 
over ripe, or, in other words, to form seed, 
there is probably a loss of nutriment. At any 
rate cows will not eat and digest this over-ripe 
hay as readily as|]they will hay that is cut be¬ 
fore the seed is fully matured. But it is not 
clear to my mind that, by letting the timothy 
go to seed you impoverish the soil. And so in 
growing corn for fodder I see no reason for 
supposing that it does not impoverish the soil 
nearly or quite as much as if we grew the crop 
for the sake of the grain. 
“I don’t believe any such a doctrine,” re¬ 
marks the Deacon. “Do you think your 
Northern Spy trees that produced such a grand 
crop of apples this year have not taken more 
substance out of the soil than if they had not 
produced fruit ? ” 
“ I suppose if they had not produced fruit 
they would have produced more wood. I think 
the roots would have taken nearly or quite as ! 
much water and plant-food out of the soil in 
the one case as in the other. The reason so 
many apple-trees bear only every other year is 
that during the “bearing year” the excess of 
fruit absorbs the material that ought to be 
stored up for the next crop. And this is my 
reason for thinning out the fruit.” 
“Yes, I know,” says the Deacon, “ but it is 
a good deal cf work, and farmers can not spare 
the time to do it.” 
“ It takes no more time to pick off a little 
apple in the summer than it does to pick the 
same apple in the fall—and with me the fall is 
the busiest season of the year. I got this idea 
from J. J. Thomas. I used to think, as you 
do, that thinning fruit was one of the refine¬ 
ments of horticulture which those of us who 
grow apples and peaches largely for market 
could not stop to bother with. But Mr. 
Thomas’s remark above quoted convinced me 
of my error. If there are two thousand apples 
on a tree in the summer and I let them grow, 
I have to pick them all in the fall. If this is 
as many again apples as the tree ought to bear, 
the two thousand apples wmuld fill say five 
barrels. Now, if I pick off one thousand of 
the smallest and poorest and specked and 
W'ormy apples in the summer, and let the sheep 
and pigs eat them up, the probabilities are that 
the thousand apples left on the tree would 
grow so much larger that they would fill the 
five barrels as before. We pick tw r o thousand 
apples in either case, and get the same amount 
of fruit.” 
“ What, then, do we gain ? ” 
“ In the first place, the thousand apples do not 
exhaust the tree as much as the two thousand. 
There is as much fruit by measure, but it con¬ 
sists largely of material that takes little from 
the tree or the soil. There is only half as 
much seed, etc. We ought to thin out at least 
enough to leave the tree strength enough to 
bear a full crop the next year. In the second 
place, the thousand apples are worth much 
more than the two thousand; and last, but not 
least, the trees will bear every year.” 
“ That is all true enough, and you might put 
it still stronger; but do you mean to say that 
you can grow apples so big that two hundred 
fill a barrel?” 
“ When we were barreling our Northern Spy 
apples I had the curiosity to count how many 
apples it took to fill a barrel heaped up ready 
for pressing. One of my men counted one 
barrel and I another. We did not select the 
largest, but about the average of the best fruit. 
My barrel took 222 apples and his 218 apples. 
I then told him to select out the largest apples, 
and we filled a barrel with 190 and another 
with 186 apples. The latter I headed up just 
as they were and sent to the editor of the 
American Agriculturist. I presume the rail¬ 
road people would do their best to bruise them 
before they got to the end cf their 400-mile 
journey. [They succeeded too.— Ed.] 
“An apple crop, like wheat, is a pleasant 
thing to have during these hard times. The 
money comes in a lump. I sold my apple crop 
all to one man, and drew them directly out of 
the orchard to the depot. They came to 
$1,256.50. It is quite a help.” 
“ It is so,” said the Deacon. “ You have no 
other four acres on the farm that will pay half 
as much. That orchard, the way you manage 
it, is good for a thousand barrels of apples.” 
I never knew the Deacon come so near pay¬ 
ing me a compliment. I deserve no other 
credit than this: I had faith in good farm¬ 
ing. I knew the Northern Spy was a veiy 
choice apple. I knew that in orchards as or¬ 
dinarily managed it often failed to prove a 
profitable variety. Scores of farmers as they 
drove by have stopped and urged me to graft 
the orchard to Baldwins and Greenings. I said: 
“No. The Northern Spy is one of the best 
apples in the world, and of course, like all 
choice things, it requires the best of manage¬ 
ment. Neglect the orchard and you can not 
have a worse variety; treat it well, prune judi¬ 
ciously, and manure highly, and you can not 
have a better.” There was a principle at stake, 
and I have waited patiently, and have not 
waited in vain. Several of the trees this year 
bore five barrels of the choicest fruit. I think 
when they get into full bearing they arc, as the 
Deacon says, “good” for ten barrels. 
I have now lived ten years on this farm, and 
have written “ Wallis and Talks” every month 
during this time. I feel somewhat ashamed to 
think how much of my purely personal matters 
I have presented to the public. I commenced 
to write without thinking; I told precisely 
what happened. Unfortunately, what happened 
proved to be largely mistakes and failures. I 
sent to Gregory, of Marblehead, for some seed 
of his best variety of onion, and sowed it on 
land that I should now think too poor to raise 
white beans and too weedy to sow to buck¬ 
wheat. You can imagine the result. My first 
crop of oats was eight bushels per acre, and of 
barley twelve bushels. Farming is slow work. 
I have not yet got my land anything like as 
clean as I want it. I keep working and hop¬ 
ing.—“ Yes,” says the Deacon, “ and walking 
and talking.”—Precisely. That is what I 
wanted to get at. I have told of so many dis¬ 
appointments and discouragements that while, 
as I said before, I commenced this series of ar¬ 
ticles little thinking that I should continue to 
write them so long, yet I do not know how to 
stop. I believe in farming, and feel sure that 
it can be made not only a pleasant but a profit¬ 
able business And if my land is getting 
cleaner and richer and my crops larger and 
more profitable I hope to be excused for say¬ 
ing so. I have told of my failures and the 
reasons for them. I want to tell of my suc¬ 
cesses—if I ever have any. I think the read¬ 
ers of agricultural papers do not need informa¬ 
tion so much as exhortation. What we need 
