EXPERIMENTS WITH POTATOES. 
3 
ability to bear tubers, unless grown under the most favor¬ 
able conditions. 
The soil on which these varieties have been grown 
continuously for three years is a clay loam. It has been 
enriched annually, and very liberally, with manures calcu¬ 
lated to improve its tilth and fertility. 
The varieties in competition were treated as nearly 
alike as possible, in regard to soil, seed, cultivation and 
irrigation. The seed pieces were confined to one eye sets 
of good substance, cut from large tubers, and were 
planted May 15th, in rows three feet apart, the sets one 
foot apart in the row. Ten hills of each kind were ex¬ 
perimented with. 
The best potato soils are loose, sandy loams, and if 
so situated as to be contiguous to irrigating ditches, as on 
side-hills, maximum crops may be raised with the mini¬ 
mum of labor and attention. Loose, friable, moist and 
cool soils are most congenial to the tubers of this plant. 
Its nature would suggest this, because the tuber must 
push the soil from around it during the process of growth, 
and if the soil be hard and lumpy, the tuber will be mis¬ 
shapen, and its vital forces seriously impaired. We irri¬ 
gated three times, the frequency of which would depend 
upon such contingencies as the slope of the land, its 
position in reference to seepage, character of the soil, rain¬ 
fall during the growing season, from all of which will be 
seen the difficulty present in attempting to estimate the 
quantity of water necessary to mature any given crop. 
The tendency of all irrigation is to bind more solidly all 
adhesive, fine-grained soils, so that the first requisite of 
success, as regards soil, is to see to its mechanical condi¬ 
tion, and that no flooding of the soil occurs, as the potato 
is extremely impatient of this. The most prolific va¬ 
rieties are uniformly so from year to year. If they are 
not so, such result may justly be attributed to the acci¬ 
dent of location, which so frequently results in their get¬ 
ting too much water. 
