form against to prevent their becoming long and crooked. For the 
same reason, the old practice of making a very high hill is an error. The 
best crops are grown where .the ridges are never made higher than most 
of our farmers hill cotton or corn, and the work can be done with the 
same tools. Some wait for what they call a “season for setting the 
plants”—that is, they want the land wet from rain. This is an error, 
for the plants set in wet land will often get a hard crust around them that 
checks their growth. We prefer to have the soil merely in good 
working order. The plants are drawn carefully from the bed, and at 
once set in buckets or tubs of water. A boy takes a bucket along and 
hands to the planter each plant dripping with water. It is set deeply, 
and puddles itself into the soil.. Only the tip of the plant is left out of the 
ground, and the earth is closely pressed to it. The previous prepara¬ 
tion of the soil is of the greatest importance. We would have said that 
the plowing should be shallow, but it should be repeated and thorough, 
so as to mix the broadcasted manure very completely with the soil. 
The sweet potato is one of the crops which need little application of 
nitrogen. An excess of nitrogenous matter in the soil leads to a rank 
growth of vines without a corresponding crop of roots. We do not 
mean that sweet potatoes cannot be grown on rich land. If the me¬ 
chanical texture is all right, it matters little how fertile the soil, pro¬ 
vided the fertility is well balanced. The plant can use the nitrogen profit¬ 
ably if the ration is balanced with a sufficient amount of potash and 
phosphoric acid. It is the excess of nitrofen that causes the plants to 
run to vines. The form in which artificial nitrogen is supplied is also 
of importance. It should all be in some good organic form, as cotton¬ 
seed meal, blood, tankage, etc., and no nitrate of soda should be used, 
as the sodium salts are not good for this crop. Potash is the most im¬ 
portant element. 
I know that the practice has become common among the growers 
of the Eastern Shore to use large quantities of salt in the preparation of 
a compost for the potato crop, and that manv have the notion that salt 
is a good manure. The fact is, that in the way the salt is used in com¬ 
post beds with woods earth during the winter, the salt is mainly gone 
by the time the compost is applied to the land, and the only good it 
does is to render soluble certain matters in the vegetable matter that 
it is mixed with. This could as well be accomplished by the use of 
kainit in the same way. But the use of chlorides has a tendency to de¬ 
teriorate the quality of the potato. The fad for the use of salt on the 
sweet potato crop that has been so prevalent among Virginia sweet 
potato growers will soon be a thing of the past, as they begin to find 
the practice tends to exhaustion of the soil. While potash is of the 
greatest importance to the crop, the form in which it is applied is as 
important as it is for the tobacco crop. We would never use potash 
except in the form of sulphate unless it could be cheaply gotten in the 
form of hard wood ashes, which is doubtless the best shape to get it 
if they can be had cheaply enough in comparison with the sulphate. The 
best way to prepare the land is to apply broadcast a good coat of leaf 
mold from a piney woods, which was piled up the fall before in layers 
with lime. Then apply all the other fertilizers in the furrow under the 
beds. If a good coat of lime and leaf mould compost is added, all 
over the land, there will be no need to use any nitrogen for the crop. 
Otherwise, we would then apply a mixture of acid phosphate and sul- 
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