| 
| 
| 
| 
712 
other crops, elaborate their substance out of the 
gases and moisture of the atmosphere ; in parti- 
cular, they form the whole of their saccharine 
matter out of atmospheric sources; and as this 
matter, though not so great in the percentage of 
each root as in beet, is exceedingly great in its 
ageregate produce per acre, carrots might be 
grown merely for sake of their sugar ; and if all 
their stems and foliage, and all the refuse of 
their roots from the sugar manufacture, were 
carefully returned to the soil, they might be 
raised year after year, in all the successive years 
of a century, upon one field, without exhausting 
it of one particle of its fertility. The conjecture 
may seem to even scientific farmers exceedingly 
chimerical—yet in these days of rapid and vast 
improvement in legislation, in agricultural che- 
mistry, and in scientific georgy, it is by no means 
imprebable—that a large portion of the bogs of 
Ireland, at present so worthless and dismai, may, 
in the course of two or three decads, be regularly 
erepped with carrots, and yield to Britain an in- 
comparably richer supply of sugar than she has 
ever yet obtained from the fertile and beautiful 
cane plantations of the West Indies. 
The use of manure, in the field cultivation of 
carrots, has been the subject of much debate, and 
does not seem, as to the principle of it, to be 
well understood; yet, in the best carrot-growing 
districts of England, it is generally and even pro- 
fusely practised. Some agriculturists contend 
that no manure whatever should be given, and 
that the ground should as nearly as possible be 
in the condition of virgin soil; some, that rich 
manuring of the previous year should provide for 
the carrot crop; some, that fresh manure should 
be so applied as to lie buried at the depth of six- 
teen or seventeen inches, to yield its imfluence 
to most of the growth only in the form of ascend- 
ing gas and vapour, and to sustain contact with 
the tips of the roots only when they are close 
upon maturity; and some, that fresh manure 
should be applied in the manner of thorough in- 
termixture with the soil, Experiment certainly 
seems to prove that, acre per acre, the produce 
of richly manured carrots is bulkier than the 
produce of carrots upon unmanured soil. One 
experiment, for example—though it is decidedly 
an extreme one in favour of manure—exhibits 
the produce per acre of manured carrots at twelve 
tons of roots and five tons of tops, and that of 
unmanured carrots at nine tons of roots and four 
tons of tops, Arthur Young even employs such 
strong language as the following: “If you would 
command your crops of this root, you should 
manure the land with twenty-five or thirty loads 
of dung per acre, pretty rotten, ploughed in, and 
then cover the seed by harrowing. The dung 
neither injures the taste of the carrots, makes 
them grow deformed, nor causes the canker, A 
farmer’s object is to produce as great a quantity 
as possible from every acre, which must undoubt- 
edly be accomplished by manure.” But if dung 
CARROT. 
be applied in any such manner or to any such 
extent as Mr. Young recommends, it must cer- 
tainly be thoroughly decomposed and so “short” 
as to admit of perfect and even pulverulent in- 
termixture with the soil. Any farm-yard man- 
ure which is “long,” or not completely decom- 
posed, will certainly make the roots fork, and 
probably subject them to the attacks of the worm, 
and possibly render such as otherwise escape ill- 
flavoured and unfit for either culinary or market 
use. The Suffolk and Norfolk farmers, who have 
long had the fame of being the best carrot-grow- 
ers of Britain, but who generally operate upon a 
soil of peculiar mechanical conditions, always 
turn ina suitable proportion of well-retted farm- | 
yard dung, at the March ploughing immediately 
before the sowing of carrots; and, though few 
seem to have raised the question, still less to 
have tested it, they probably owe the acknow- | 
fledged beneficial effects of the practice, fully 
more to the mechanical action of the manure | 
than to its supposed chemical influence. 
Bur- | 
rows, an intelligent Norfolk farmer, who, in a | 
communication to the Board of Agriculture, gave | 
one of the best statements on field carrot culture | 
which has ever appeared in print, always pre- | 
pared his carrot-land with a dressing of about 
sixteen cart-loads per acre of cottagers’ ashes or 
of well-rotted farm-yard manure,—each load hav- | 
ing been as much as three strong horses could 
draw; and he usually selected as his carrot-land 
wheat-stubble after clover, ploughed it first in 
autumn and next in February, and both laid on | 
the manure and sowed the seed in the last week 
of March or in the first or second week of April. 
In Suffolk, carrot-land after pease is usually | 
ploughed as soon as the pea-crop is harvested ; 
and in December, it is laid up in small balks, to 
be mellowed by the frost; in February, it is har- 
rowed down, manured with farm-yard dung at 
the rate of fifteen loads per acre, and has the | 
manure ploughed in to the depth of about: four | 
inches; and, in the latter part of March, it is 
double-furrowed and sown. In Norfolk, land for 
carrots is usually selected after turnips ; in the be- | 
ginning of March, it is first manured, next plough- | 
ed with a common plough, and next trench-plough- 
ed to the depth of fourteen or fifteen inches; and 
in the middle or latter part of March, it is very | 
finely harrowed, and then sown. In Brittany, the | 
preparation of carrot-land is effected by the joint 
operations of the spade and the plough, and by a 
combination of the resources of several farms, 
“The different farmers join to bring as many 
labourers together as will dig out a furrow as ra- 
pidly as the plough can draw it: they divide the 
whole length of the field equally among them. 
As soon as the plough has made a furrow, the 
men trench the bottom of it with their spades 
nine or ten inches deep, throwing the earth over 
the furrow-slice last turned ; on the return of the 
plough, the next slice is turned into the deep 
trench, and immediately covered by the spades 
