PRACTICAL PAPERS—WHEAT-GROWING. 
175 
That the average yield of wheat will not decrease with good 
farming we have abundant evidence in our own state. 
HOW TO PREVENT SMUT. 
The smut in wheat is propagated by sowing smutty wheat. 
A single berry of smutty wheat will contain a million spores; 
and in threshing many of these smut berries are broken and 
the spores are scattered through and adhere to the sound 
wheat and poison the germ, so that the wheat planted will 
produce smut again. Hence any alkali, or acid, or salts con¬ 
taining any acid, which, if sufficiently diluted, will not injure 
the germinating power of the wheat, when applied, will be an 
antidote to smut. 
The result of experiments conducted on scientific princi¬ 
ples, has shown that blue vitrol stands at the head of all these 
antidotes for smut. The most convenient mode of applying 
the vitrol is as follows: Put, say, ten bushels of clean seed 
wheat on the barn floor and dissolve one pound of vitrol in 
hot water, and add cold water until you have two quarts of 
water for each bushel of wheat. Sprinkle on the solution 
while an assistant shovels over the wheat. To have it all 
equally saturated it should be shoveled over several times and 
the scattering wheat swept up. It should be prepared ' from 
six to twenty-four hours before sowing. Where farm and seed 
are both free of smut it may not be necessary to dress all the 
seed thus, but only that intended to raise seed for the next 
year. 
MODE OF SOWING WHEAT. 
For spring wheat the broadcast seeder stands unrivaled as 
a labor-saving implement. Its cultivation is more thorough 
than that of any other implement on land fall-plowed, while its 
sowing is equal to the best hand-sowing, and yet done so as to 
save the whole cost of that plodding process—as the cultiva¬ 
tor does enough more to pay the cost of this implement. But 
for winter wheat, the wheat drill is the best implement as it 
leaves the land between the rows higher than where the wheat 
