What I know of farming
by Horace Greeley · English · Gutenberg #35696 · 544,362 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: What I know of farming
Author: Horace Greeley
Release date: March 27, 2011 [eBook #35696]
Most recently updated: January 7, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT I KNOW OF FARMING ***
Produced by Barbara Kosker, Bryan Ness and the Online
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file was produced from images generously made available
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WHAT I KNOW OF FARMING:
A SERIES OF
BRIEF AND PLAIN EXPOSITIONS
OF
PRACTICAL AGRICULTURE
AS AN ART BASED UPON SCIENCE:
BY HORACE GREELEY.
"I _know_
That where the spade is deepest driven,
The best fruits grow."
JOHN G. WHITTIER.
NEW-YORK:
PUBLISHED BY THE TRIBUNE ASSOCIATION.
1871.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by
HORACE GREELEY,
at the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
TO
THE MAN OF OUR AGE,
WHO SHALL MAKE THE FIRST PLOW PROPELLED BY
STEAM,
OR OTHER MECHANICAL POWER, WHEREBY NOT LESS THAN
TEN ACRES PER DAY
SHALL BE THOROUGHLY PULVERIZED TO A
DEPTH OF TWO FEET,
AT A COST OF NOT MORE THAN TWO DOLLARS PER ACRE,
THIS WORK IS ADMIRINGLY DEDICATED BY
THE AUTHOR.
CONTENTS BY CHAPTERS.
PAGE
I. Will Farming Pay? 13
II. Good and Bad Husbandry 18
III. Where to Farm 23
IV. Preparing to Farm 29
V. Buying a Farm 34
VI. Laying off a Farm; Pasturing 39
VII. Trees; Woodlands; Forests 44
VIII. Growing Timber; Tree-Planting. 49
IX. Planting and Growing Trees 56
X. Draining; My Own 62
XI. Draining Generally 69
XII. Irrigation; Means and Ends 74
XIII. Possibilities of Irrigation 79
XIV. Plowing, Deep or Shallow 85
XV. Plowing, Good and Bad 91
XVI. Thorough Tillage 96
XVII. Commercial Fertilizers--Gypsum. 102
XVIII. Alkalis--Salt, Ashes, Lime. 107
XIX. Soils and Fertilizers 112
XX. Bones, Phosphates, Guano 118
XXI. Muck--How to Utilize It 124
XXII. Insects; Birds 129
XXIII. About Tree-Planting 134
XXIV. Fruit-Trees--The Apple 139
XXV. More about Apple-Trees 145
XXVI. Hay and Hay-Making 150
XXVII. Peaches, Pears, Cherries, Grapes 156
XXVIII. Grain-Growing--East and West 162
XXIX. Esculent Roots--Potatoes 170
XXX. Roots--Turnips, Beets, Carrots 178
XXXI. The Farmers' Calling 183
XXXII. A Lesson of To-day 189
XXXIII. Intellect in Agriculture 195
XXXIV. Sheep and Wool-Growing 200
XXXV. Accounts in Farming 207
XXXVI. Stone on a Farm 212
XXXVII. Fences and Fencing 219
XXXVIII. Agricultural Exhibitions 225
XXXIX. Science in Agriculture 231
XL. Farm Implements 237
XLI. Steam in Agriculture 241
XLII. Co-operation in Farming 248
XLIII. Farmers' Clubs 254
XLIV. Western Irrigation. 260
XLV. Sewage 266
XLVI. More of Irrigation 274
XLVII. Undeveloped Sources of Power 280
XLVIII. Rural Depopulation 286
XLIX. Large and Small Farms 292
L. Exchange and Distribution. 297
LI. Winter Work 303
LII. Summing up 308
PREFACE.
Men have written wisely and usefully, in illustration and aid of
Agriculture, from the platform of pure science. Acquainted with the laws
of vegetable growth and life, they so expounded and elucidated those
laws that farmers apprehended and profitably obeyed them. Others have
written, to equally good purpose, who knew little of science, but were
adepts in practical agriculture, according to the maxims and usages of
those who have successfully followed and dignified the farmer's calling.
I rank with neither of these honored classes. My practical knowledge of
agriculture is meager, and mainly acquired in a childhood long bygone;
while, of science, I have but a smattering, if even that. They are
right, therefore, who urge that my qualifications for writing on
agriculture are slender indeed.
I only lay claim to an invincible willingness to be made wiser to-day
than I was yesterday, and a lively faith in the possibility--nay, the
feasibility, the urgent necessity, the imminence--of very great
improvements in our ordinary dealings with the soil. I know that a
majority of those who would live by its tillage feed it too sparingly
and stir it too slightly and grudgingly. I know that we do too little
for it, and expect it, thereupon, to do too much for us. I know that, in
other pursuits, it is only work thoroughly well done that is liberally
compensated; and I see no reason why farming should prove an exception
to this stern but salutary law. I may be, indeed, deficient in knowledge
of what constitutes good farming, but not in faith that the very best
farming is that which is morally sure of the largest and most certain
reward.
I hope to be generally accorded the merit of having set forth the little
I pretend to know in language that few can fail to understand. I have
avoided, so far as I could, the use of terms and distinctions unfamiliar
to the general ear. The little I know of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen,
&c., I have kept to myself; since whatever I might say of them would be
useless to those already acquainted with the elementary truths of
Chemistry, and only perplexing to others. If there is a paragraph in the
following pages which will not be readily and fully understood by an
average school-boy of fifteen years, then I have failed to make that
paragraph as simple and lucid as I intended.
Many farmers are dissuaded from following the suggestions of writers on
agriculture by the consideration of expense. They urge that, though men
of large wealth may (perhaps) profitably do what is recommended, their
means are utterly inadequate: they might as well be urged to work their
oxen in a silver yoke with gold bows. I have aimed to commend mainly, if
not uniformly, such improvements only on our grandfathers' husbandry as
a farmer worth $1,000, or over, may adopt--not all at once, but
gradually, and from year to year. I hope I shall thus convince some
farmers that draining, irrigation, deep plowing, heavy fertilizing, &c.,
are not beyond their power, as so many have too readily presumed and
pronounced them.
That I should say very little, and that little vaguely, of the breeding
and raising of animals, the proper time to sow or plant, &c., &c., can
need no explanation. By far the larger number of those whose days have
mainly been given to farming, know more than I do of these details, and
are better authority than I am with regard to them. On the other hand, I
have traveled extensively, and not heedlessly, and have seen and
pondered certain broader features of the earth's improvement and tillage
which many stay-at-home cultivators have had little or no opportunity to
study or even observe. By restricting the topics with which I deal, the
probability of treating some of them to the average farmer's profit is
increased.
And, whatever may be his judgment on this slight work, I _know_ that, if
I could have perused one of like tenor half a century ago, when I was a
patient worker and an eager reader in my father's humble home, my
subsequent career would have been less anxious and my labors less
exhausting than they have been. Could I then have caught but a glimpse
of the beneficent possibilities of a farmer's life--could I have
realized that he is habitually (even though blindly) dealing with
problems which require and reward the amplest knowledge of Nature's
laws, the fullest command of science, the noblest efforts of the human
intellect, I should have since pursued the peaceful, unobtrusive round
of an enthusiastic and devoted, even though not an eminent or fortunate,
tiller of the soil. Even the little that is unfolded in the ensuing
pages would have sufficed to give me a far larger, truer, nobler
conception of what the farmer of moderate means might and should be,
than I then attained. I needed to realize that observation and
reflection, study and mental acquisition, are as essential and as
serviceable in his pursuit as in others, and that no man can have
acquired so much general knowledge that a farmer's exigencies will not
afford scope and use for it all. I abandoned the farm, because I fancied
that I had already perceived, if I had not as yet clearly comprehended,
all there was in the farmer's calling; whereas, I had not really learned
much more of it than a good plow-horse ought to understand. And, though
great progress has been made since then, there are still thousands of
boys, in this enlightened age and conceited generation, who have
scarcely a more adequate and just conception of agriculture than I then
had. If I could hope to reach even one in every hundred of this class,
and induce him to ponder, impartially, the contents of this slight
volume, I know that I shall not have written it in vain.
We need to mingle more thought with our work. Some think till their
heads ache intensely; others work till their backs are crooked to the
semblance of half an iron hoop; but the workers and the thinkers are apt
to be distinct classes; whereas, they should be the same. Admit that it
has always been thus, it by no means follows that it always should or
shall be. In an age when every laborer's son may be fairly educated if
he will, there should be more fruit gathered from the tree of knowledge
to justify the magnificent promise of its foliage and its bloom. I
rejoice in the belief that the graduates of our common schools are
better ditch-diggers, when they can no otherwise employ themselves to
better advantage, than though they knew not how to read; but that is not
enough. If the untaught peasantry of Russia or Hungary grow more wheat
per acre than the comparatively educated farmers of the United States,
our education is found wanting. That is a vicious and defective if not
radically false mental training which leaves its subject no better
qualified for any useful calling than though he were unlettered. But I
forbear to pursue this ever-fruitful theme.
I look back, on this day completing my sixtieth year, over a life, which
must now be near its close, of constant effort to achieve ends whereof
many seem in the long retrospect to have been transitory and
unimportant, however they may have loomed upon my vision when in their
immediate presence. One achievement only of our age and country--the
banishment of human chattelhood from our soil--seems now to have been
worth all the requisite efforts, the agony and bloody sweat, through
which it was accomplished. But another reform, not so palpably demanded
by justice and humanity, yet equally conducive to the well-being of our
race, presses hard on its heels, and insists that we shall accord it
instant and earnest consideration. It is the elevation of Labor from the
plane of drudgery and servility to one of self-respect, self-guidance,
and genuine independence, so as to render the human worker no mere cog
in a vast, revolving wheel, whose motion he can neither modify nor
arrest, but a partner in the enterprise which his toil is freely
contributed to promote, a sharer in the outlay, the risk, the loss and
gain, which it involves. This end can be attained through the training
of the generation who are to succeed us to observe and reflect, to live
for other and higher ends than those of present sensual gratification,
and to feel that no achievement is beyond the reach of their wisely
combined and ably self-directed efforts. To that part of the generation
of farmers just coming upon the stage of responsible action, who have
intelligently resolved that the future of American agriculture shall
evince decided and continuous improvement on its past, this little book
is respectfully commended.
H. G.
_New York, Feb. 3, 1871._
WHAT I KNOW OF FARMING.
I.
WILL FARMING PAY?
I commence my essays with this question, because, when I urge the
superior advantages of a rural life, I am often met by the objection
that _Farming doesn't pay_. That, if true, is a serious matter. Let us
consider:
I do not understand it to be urged that the farmer who owns a large,
fertile estate, well-fenced, well-stocked, with good store of effective
implements, cannot live and thrive by farming. What is meant is, that he
who has little but two brown hands to depend upon cannot make money, or
can make very little, by farming.
I think those who urge this point have a very inadequate conception of
the difficulty encountered by every poor young man in securing a good
start in life, no matter in what pursuit. I came to New-York when not
quite of age, with a good constitution, a fair common-school education,
good health, good habits, and a pretty fair trade--(that of printer.) I
think my outfit for a campaign against adverse fortune was decidedly
better than the average; yet ten long years elapsed before it was
settled that I could remain here and make any decided headway. Meantime,
I drank no liquors, used no tobacco, attended no balls or other
expensive entertainments, worked hard and long whenever I could find
work to do, lost less than a month altogether by sickness, and did very
little in the way of helping others. I judge that quite as many did
worse than I as did better; and that, of the young lawyers and doctors
who try to establish themselves here in their professions, quite as many
earn less as earn more than their bare board during the first ten years
of their struggle.
John Jacob Astor, near the close of a long, diligent, prosperous career,
wherein he amassed a large fortune, is said to have remarked that, if he
were to begin life again, and had to choose between making his first
thousand dollars with nothing to start on, or with that thousand making
all that he had actually accumulated, he would deem the latter the
easier task. Depend upon it, young men, it is and must be hard work to
earn honestly your first thousand dollars. The burglar, the forger, the
blackleg (whether he play with cards, with dice, or with stocks), may
seem to have a quick and easy way of making a thousand dollars; but
whoever makes that sum honestly, with nothing but his own capacities and
energies as capital, does a very good five-years' work, and may deem
himself fortunate if he finishes it so soon.
I _have_ known men do better, even at farming. I recollect one who, with
no capital but a good wife and four or five hundred dollars, bought
(near Boston) a farm of two hundred mainly rough acres, for $2,500, and
paid for it out of its products within the next five years, during which
he had nearly doubled its value. I lost sight of him then; but I have
not a doubt that, if he lived fifteen years longer and had no very bad
luck, he was worth, as the net result of twenty years' effort, at least
$100,000. But this man would rise at four o'clock of a winter morning,
harness his span of horses and hitch them to his large market-wagon
(loaded over night), drive ten miles into Boston, unload and load back
again, be home at fair breakfast-time, and, hastily swallowing his meal,
be fresh as a daisy for his day's work, in which he would lead his hired
men, keeping them clear of the least danger of falling asleep. Such men
are rare, but they still exist, proving scarcely anything impossible to
an indomitable will. I would not advise any to work so unmercifully; I
seek only to enforce the truth that great achievements are within the
reach of whoever will pay their price.
An energetic farmer bought, some twenty-five years ago, a large grazing
farm in Northern Vermont, consisting of some 150 acres, and costing him
about $3,000. He had a small stock of cattle, which was all his land
would carry; but he resolved to increase that stock by at least ten per
cent. per annum, and to so improve his land by cultivation, fertilizing,
clover, &c., that it would amply carry that increase. Fifteen years
later, he sold out farm and stock for $45,000, and migrated to the West.
I did not understand that he was a specially hard worker, but only a
good manager, who kept his eyes wide open, let nothing go to waste, and
steadily devoted his energies and means to the improvement of his stock
and his farm.
Walking one day over the farm of the late Prof. Mapes, he showed me a
field of rather less than ten acres, and said, "I bought that field for
$2,400, a year ago last September. There was then a light crop of corn
on it, which the seller reserved and took away. I underdrained the field
that Fall, plowed and sub-soiled it, fertilized it liberally, and
planted it with cabbage; and, when these matured, I sold them for enough
to pay for land, labor, and fertilizers, altogether." The field was now
worth far more than when he bought it, and he had cleared it within
fifteen months from the date of its purchase. I consider that a good
operation. Another year, the crop might have been poor, or might have
sold much lower, so as hardly to pay for the labor; but there are risks
in other pursuits as well as in farming.
A fruit-farmer, on the Hudson above Newburg, showed me, three years
since, a field of eight or ten acres which he had nicely set with
Grapes, in rows ten feet apart, with beds of Strawberries between the
rows, from which he assured me that his sales per acre exceeded $700 per
annum. I presume his outlay for labor, including picking, was less than
$300 per annum; but it had cost something, to make this field what it
then was. Say that he had spent $1,000 per acre in underdraining,
enriching and tilling this field, to bring it to this condition,
including the cost of his plants, and still there must have been a clear
profit here of at least $300 per acre.
I might multiply illustrations; but let the foregoing suffice. I readily
admit that shiftless farming doesn't pay--that poor crops don't pay--that
it is hard work to make money by farming without some capital--that
frost, or hail, or drouth, or floods, or insects, may blast the farmer's
hopes, after he has done his best to deserve and achieve success; but I
insist that, as a general proposition, GOOD _Farming_ DOES _pay_--that
few pursuits afford as good a prospect, as full an assurance, of reward
for intelligent, energetic, persistent effort, as this does.
I am not arguing that every man should be a farmer. Other vocations are
useful and necessary, and many pursue them with advantage to themselves
and to others. But those pursuits are apt to be modified by time, and
some of them may yet be entirely dispensed with, which Farming never can
be. It is the first and most essential of human pursuits; it is every
one's interest that this calling should be honored and prosperous. If
not adequately recompensed, I judge that is because it is not wisely and
energetically followed. My aim is to show how it may be pursued with
satisfaction and profit.
II.
GOOD AND BAD HUSBANDRY.
Necessity is the master of us all. A farmer may be as strenuous for deep
plowing as I am--may firmly believe that the soil should be thoroughly
broken up and pulverized to a depth of fifteen to thirty inches,
according to the crop; but, if all the team he can muster is a yoke of
thin, light steers, or a span of old, spavined horses, which have not
even a speaking acquaintance with grain, what shall he do? So he may
heartily wish he had a thousand loads of barn-yard manure, and know how
to make a good use of every ounce of it; but, if he has it not, and is
not able to buy it, he can't always afford to forbear sowing and
planting, and so, because he cannot secure great crops, do without any
crops at all. If he does the best he can, what better _can_ he do?
Again: Many farmers have fields that must await the pleasure of Nature
to fit them for thorough cultivation. Here is a field--sometimes a whole
farm--which, if partially divested of the primitive forest, is still
thickly dotted with obstinate stumps and filled with green, tenacious
roots, which could only be removed at a heavy, perhaps ruinous, cost. A
rich man might order them all dug out in a month, and see his order
fully obeyed; but, except to clear a spot for a garden or under very
peculiar circumstances, it would not pay; and a poor man cannot afford
to incur a heavy expense merely for appearance's sake, or to make a
theatrical display of energy. In the great majority of cases, he who
farms for a living can't afford to pull green stumps, but must put his
newly-cleared land into grass at the earliest day, mow the smoother,
pasture the rougher portions of it, and wait for rain and drouth, heat
and frost, to rot his stumps until they can easily be pulled or burned
out as they stand.
So with regard to a process I detest, known as Pasturing. I do firmly
believe that the time is at hand when nearly all the food of cattle
will, in our Eastern and Middle States, be cut and fed to them--that we
can't afford much longer, even if we can at present, to let than roam at
will over hill and dale, through meadow and forest, biting off the
better plants and letting the worse go to seed; often poaching up the
soft, wet soil, especially in Spring, so that their hoofs destroy as
much as they eat; nipping and often killing in their infancy the finest
trees, such as the Sugar Maple, and leaving only such as Hemlock, Red
Oak, Beech, &c., to attain maturity. Our race generally emerged from
savageism and squalor into industry, comfort and thrift, through the
Pastoral condition--the herding, taming, rearing and training of
animals being that department of husbandry to which barbarians are most
easily attracted: hence, we cling to Pasturing long after the reason for
it has vanished. The radical, incurable vice of Pasturing--that of
devouring the better plants and leaving the worse to ripen and diffuse
seed--can never be wholly obviated; and I deem it safe to estimate that
almost any farm will carry twice as much stock if their food be mainly
cut and fed to them as it will if they are required to pick it up where
and as it grows or grew. I am sure that the general adoption of Soiling
instead of Pasturing will add immensely to the annual product, to the
wealth, and to the population, of our older States. And yet, I know
right well that many farms are now so rough and otherwise so unsuited to
Soiling as to preclude its adoption thereon for many years to come.
Let me indicate what I mean by Good Farming, through an illustration
drawn from the Great West:
All over the settled portions of the Valley of the Upper Mississippi and
the Missouri, there are large and small herds of cattle that are
provided with little or no shelter. The lee of a fence or stack, the
partial protection of a young and leafless wood, they may chance to
enjoy; but that it is a ruinous waste to leave than a prey to biting
frosts and piercing north-westers, their owners seem not to comprehend.
Many farmers far above want will this Winter feed out fields of Corn and
stacks of Hay to herds of cattle that will not be one pound heavier on
the 1st of next May than they were on the 1st of last December--who
will have required that fodder merely to preserve their vitality and
escape freezing to death. It has mainly been employed as fuel rather
than as nourishment, and has served, not to put on flesh, but to keep
out frost.
Now I am familiar with the excuses for this waste; but they do not
satisfy me. The poorest pioneer might have built for his one cow a rude
shelter of stakes, and poles, and straw or prairie-grass, if he had
realized its importance, simply in the light of economy. He who has many
cattle is rarely without both straw and timber, and might shelter his
stock abundantly if he only would. Nay, he could not have neglected or
omitted it if he had clearly understood that his beasts must somehow be
supplied with heat, and that he can far cheaper warm them from without
than from within.
The broad, general, unquestionable truths, on which I insist in behalf
of Good Farming are these; and I do not admit that they are subject to
exception:
I. It is very rarely impracticable to grow good crops, if you are
willing to work for them. If your land is too poor to grow Wheat or
Corn, and you are not yet able to enrich it, sow Rye or Buckwheat; if
you cannot coax it to grow a good crop of anything, let it alone; and,
if you cannot run away from it, work out by the day or month for your
more fortunate neighbors. The time and means squandered in trying to
grow crops, where only half or quarter crops can be made, constitute
the heaviest item on the wrong side of our farmers' balance-sheets;
taxing them more than their National, State, and local governments
together do.
II. Good crops rarely fail to yield a profit to the grower. I know there
are exceptions, but they are very few. Keep your eye on the farmer who
almost uniformly has great Grass, good Wheat, heavy Corn, &c., and,
unless he drinks, or has some other bad habit, you will find him growing
rich. I am confident that white blackbirds are nearly as abundant as
farmers who have become poor while usually growing good crops.
III. The fairest single test of good farming is the increasing
productiveness of the soil. That farm which averaged twenty bushels of
grain to the acre twenty years ago, twenty-five bushels ten years ago,
and will measure up thirty bushels to the acre from this year's crop,
has been and is in good hands. I know no other touchstone of Farming so
unerring as that of the increase or decrease from year to year of its
aggregate product. If you would convince me that X. is a good farmer, do
not tell me of some great crop he has just grown, but show me that his
crop has regularly increased from year to year, and I am satisfied.
--I shall have more to say on these points as I proceed. It suffices for
the present if I have clearly indicated what I mean by Good and what by
Bad Farming.
III.
WHERE TO FARM.
When my father was over sixty years old, and had lived some twenty years
in Erie County, Pennsylvania, he said to me: "I have several times
removed, and always toward the West; I shall never remove again; but,
were I to do so, it would be toward the East. Experience has taught me
that the advantages of every section are counterbalanced by
disadvantages, and that, where any crop is easily produced, there it
sells low, and sometimes cannot be sold at all. I shall live and die
right here; but, were I to remove again, it would not be toward the
West."
This is but one side of a truth, and I give it for whatever it may be
worth. Had my father plunged into the primitive forest in his
twenty-fifth rather than his forty-fifth year, he would doubtless have
become more reconciled to pioneer life than he ever did. I would advise
no one over forty years of age to undertake, with scanty means, to dig a
farm out of the dense forest, where great trees must be cut down and cut
up, rolled into log-heaps, and hurried to ashes where they grew. Where
half the timber can be sold for enough to pay the cost of cutting, the
case is different; but I know right well that digging a farm out of the
high woods is, to any but a man of wealth, a slow, hard task. Making one
out of naked prairie, five to ten miles from timber, is less difficult,
but not much. He who can locate where he has good timber on one side and
rich prairie on the other is fortunate, and may hope, if his health be
spared, to surround himself with every needed comfort within ten years.
Still, the pioneer's life is a rugged one, especially for women and
children; and I should advise any man who is worth $2,000 and has a
family, to buy out an "improvement" (which, in most cases, badly needs
improving) on the outskirt of civilization, rather than plunge into the
pathless forest or push out upon the unbroken prairie. I rejoice that
our Public Lands are free to actual settlers; I believe that many are
thereby enabled to make for themselves homes who otherwise would have
nothing to leave their children; yet I much prefer a home within the
boundaries of civilization to one clearly beyond them. There is a class
of drinking, hunting, frolicking, rarely working, frontiersmen, who seem
to have been created on purpose to erect log cabins and break paths in
advance of a different class of settlers, who regularly come in to buy
them out and start them along after a few years. I should here prefer to
follow rather than lead. If Co-operation shall ever be successfully
applied to the improvement of wild lands, I trust it may be otherwise.
He who has a farm already, and is content with it, has no reason to ask,
"Whither shall I go?" and he may rest assured that thoroughly good
farming will pay as well in New England as in Kansas or in Minnesota. I
advise no man who has a good farm anywhere, and is able to keep it, to
sell and migrate. I know men who make money by growing food within
twenty miles of this city quite as fast as they could in the West. If
you have money to buy and work it, and know how to make the most of it,
I believe you may find land really as cheap, all things considered, in
Vermont as in Wisconsin or Arkansas.
And yet I believe in migration--believe that there are thousands in the
Eastern and the Middle States who would improve their circumstances and
prospects by migrating to the cheaper lands and broader opportunities of
the West and South. For, in the first place, most men are by migration
rendered more energetic and aspiring; thrown among strangers, they feel
the necessity of exertion as they never felt it before. Needing almost
everything, and obliged to rely wholly on themselves, they work in their
new homes as they never did in their old; and the consequences are soon
visible all around them.
"A stern chase is a long chase," say the sailors; and he who buys a farm
mainly on credit, intending to pay for it out of its proceeds, finds
interest, taxes, sickness, bad seasons, hail, frost, drouth, tornadoes,
floods, &c., &c., deranging his calculations and impeding his progress,
until he is often impelled to give up in despair. There are men who can
surmount every obstacle and defy discouragement--these need no advice;
but there are thousands who, having little means and large families, can
grow into a good farm more easily and far more surely than they can pay
for it; and these may wisely seek homes where population is yet sparse
and land is consequently cheap. Doubtless, some migrate who might better
have forborne; yet the instinct which draws our race toward sunset is
nevertheless a true one. The East will not be depopulated; but the West
will grow more rapidly in the course of the next twenty years than ever
in the past. The Railroads which have brought Kansas and Minnesota
within three days, and California within a week of us, have rendered
this inevitable.
But the South also invites immigration as she never did till now. Her
lands are still very cheap; she is better timbered, in the average, than
the West; her climate attracts; her unopened mines and unused
water-power call loudly for enterprise, labor and skill. It is absurd to
insist that her soil is exhausted when not one-third of it has ever yet
been plowed. I do not advise solitary migration to the South, because
she needs schools, mills, roads, bridges, churches, &c., &c., which the
solitary immigrant can neither provide nor well do without: and I have
no assurance that he, if obliged to work out for present bread, would
find those ready to employ and willing to pay him; but let a hundred
Northern farmers and mechanics worth $1,000 to $3,000 each combine to
select (through chosen agents) and buy ten or twenty thousand acres in
some Southern State, embracing hill and vale, timber and tillage,
water-power and minerals, and divide it equitably among themselves,
after laying it out with roads, a park, a village-plat, sites for
churches, schools, &c., and I am confident that they can thus make
pleasant homes more cheaply and speedily there than almost anywhere
else.
Good farming land, improved or unimproved, is this day cheaper in the
United States, all things considered, than in any other country--cheaper
than it can long remain. So many are intent on short cuts to riches that
the soil is generally neglected, and may be bought amazingly cheap in
parts of Connecticut as well as in Iowa or Nebraska. When I was last in
Illinois, I rode for some hours beside a gray-coated farmer of some
sixty years, who told me this: "I came here thirty years ago, and took
up, at $1-1/4 per acre, a good tract of land, mainly in timber. I am now
selling off the timber at $100 per acre, reserving the land." That seems
to me a good operation--not so quick as a corner in the stock-market,
but far safer. And, while I would advise no man to incur debt, I say
most earnestly to all who have means, "Look out the place where you
would prefer to live and die; take time to suit yourself thoroughly;
choose it with reference to your means, your calling, your expectations,
and, if you can pay for it, _buy_ it. Do not imagine that land is cheap
in the West or the South only; it is to be found cheap in _every_ State
by those who are able to own and who know how to use it."
I earnestly trust that the obvious advantages of settling in colonies
are to be widely and rapidly improved by our people, nearly as follows:
One thousand heads of families unite to form a colony, contribute $100
to $500 each to defray the cost of seeking out and securing a suitable
location, and send out two or three of the most capable and trustworthy
of their number to find and purchase it; and now let their lands be
surveyed and divided into village or city lots at or near the center,
larger allotments (for mechanics' and merchants' homes) surrounding that
center, and far larger (for farms) outside of these; and let each
member, on or soon after his arrival, select a village-lot, out-lot,
farm, or one of each if he chooses and can pay for them. Let ample
reservations of the best sites for churches, school-houses, a town hall,
public park, etc., be made in laying out the village, and let each
purchaser of a lot or farm be required to plant shade-trees along the
highways which skirt or traverse it. If irrigation by common effort be
deemed necessary, let provision be made for that. Run up a large, roomy
structure for a family hotel or boarding-house; and now invite each
stockholder to come on, select his land, pay for it, and get up some
sort of a dwelling, leaving his family to follow when this shall have
been rendered habitable; but, if they insist on coming on with him and
taking their chances, so be it.
IV.
PREPARING TO FARM.
I write mainly for beginners--for young persons, and some not so young,
who are looking to farming as the vocation to which their future years
are to be given, by which their living is to be gained. In this chapter,
I would counsel young men, who, not having been reared in personal
contact with the daily and yearly round of a farmer's cares and duties,
purpose henceforth to live by farming.
To these I would earnestly say, "No haste!" Our boys are in too great a
hurry to be men. They want to be bosses before they have qualified
themselves to be efficient journeymen. I have personally known several
instances of young men, fresh from school or from some city vocation,
buying or hiring a farm and undertaking to work it; and I cannot now
recall a single instance in which the attempt has succeeded; while
speedy failure has been the usual result. The assumption that farming is
a rude, simple matter, requiring little intellect and less experience,
has buried many a well-meaning youth under debts which the best efforts
of many subsequent years will barely enable him to pay off. In my
opinion, half our farmers now living would say, if questioned, that they
might better have waited longer before buying or hiring a farm.
When I was ten years old, my father took a job of clearing off the
mainly fallen and partially rotten timber--largely White Pine and Black
Ash--from fifty acres of level and then swampy land; and he and his two
boys gave most of the two ensuing years (1821-2) to the rugged task.
When it was finished, I--a boy of twelve years--could have taken just
such a tract of half-burned primitive forest as that was when we took
hold of it, and cleared it by an expenditure of seventy to eighty per
cent. of the labor we actually bestowed upon that. I had learned, in
clearing this, how to economize labor in any future undertaking of the
kind; and so every one learns by experience who steadily observes and
reflects. He must have been a very good farmer at the start, or a very
poor one afterward, who cannot grow a thousand bushels of grain much
cheaper at thirty years of age than he could at twenty.
To every young man who has had no farming experience, or very little,
yet who means to make farming his vocation, I say, Hire out, for the
coming year, to the very best farmer who will give you anything like the
value of your labor. Buy a very few choice books, (if you have them not
already,) which treat of Geology, Chemistry, Botany, and the application
of their truths in Practical Agriculture; give to these the close and
thoughtful attention of your few leisure hours; keep your eyes wide
open, and set down in a note-book or pocket-diary each night a minute of
whatever has been done on the farm that day, making a note of each
storm, shower, frost, hail, etc., and also of the date at which each
planted crop requires tillage or is ripe enough to harvest, and
ascertaining, so far as possible, what each crop produced on the farm
has cost, and which of them all are produced at a profit and which at a
loss. At the year's end, hire again to the same or another good farmer
and pursue the same course; and so do till you shall be twenty-four or
twenty-five years of age, which is young enough to marry, and quite
young enough to undertake the management of a farm. By this time, if you
have carefully saved and wisely invested your earnings, you will have
several hundred dollars; and, if you do not choose to migrate to some
region where land is very cheap, you will have found some one willing to
sell you a small farm on credit, taking a long mortgage as security.
Your money--assuming that you have only what you will have earned--will
all be wanted to fix up your building, buy a team and cow, with the few
implements needed, and supply you with provisions till you can grow
some. If you can start thus experienced and full-handed, you may, by
diligence, combined with good fortune, begin to make payments on your
mortgage at the close of your second year.
I hate debt as profoundly as any one can, but I do not consider this
really running into debt. One has more land than he needs, and does not
need his pay for it forthwith; another wants land, but lacks the means
of present payment. They two enter into an agreement mutually
advantageous, whereby the poorer has the present use and ultimate
fee-simple of the farm in question, in consideration of the payment of
certain sums as duly stipulated. Technically, the buyer becomes a
debtor; practically, I do not regard him as such, until payments fall
due which he is unable promptly to meet. Let him rigorously avoid all
other debt, and he need not shrink from nor be ashamed of this.
I have a high regard for scientific attainments; I wish every young man
were thoroughly instructed in the sciences which underlie the art of
farming. But all the learning on earth, though it may powerfully help to
make a good farmer, would not of itself make one. When a young man has
learned all that seminaries and lectures, books and cabinets, can teach
him, he still needs practice and experience to make him a good farmer.
--"But wouldn't you have a young man study in order that he may become a
good farmer?"
--If he has money, Yes. I believe a youth worth four or five thousand
dollars may wisely spend a tenth of his means in attending lectures, and
even courses of study, at any good seminary where Natural Science is
taught and applied to Agriculture. But life is short at best; and he who
has no means, or very little, cannot really afford to attend even an
Agricultural College. He can acquire so much of Science as is
indispensable in the cheaper way I have indicated. He cannot wisely
consent to spend the best years of his life in getting ready to live.
He who has already mastered the art of farming, and has adequate means,
may of course buy a farm to-morrow, though he be barely or not quite of
age. He has little to learn from me. Yet I think even such have often
concluded, in after years, that they were too hasty in buying land--that
they might profitably have waited, and deliberated, and garnered the
treasures of experience, before they took the grave step of buying their
future home; with regard to which I shall make some suggestions in my
next chapter.
But I protest against a young man's declining or postponing the purchase
of a farm merely because he is not able to buy a great one. Twenty acres
of arable soil near a city or manufacturing village, forty acres in a
rural district of any old State, or eighty acres in a region just
beginning to be peopled by White men, is an ample area for any one who
is worth less than $2,000. If he understands his business, he will find
profitable employment hereon for every working hour: if he does not
understand farming, he will buy his experience dear enough on this, yet
more cheaply than he would on a wider area. Until he shall have more
money than he needs, let him beware of buying more land than he
absolutely wants.
V.
BUYING A FARM.
No one need be told at this day that good land is cheaper than
poor--that the former may be bought at less cost than it can be made.
Yet this, like most truths, may be given undue emphasis. It should be
considered in the light of the less obvious truth that _Every farmer may
make advantageous use of_ SOME _poor land_. The smallest farm
should have its strip or belt of forest; the larger should have an
abundance and variety of trees; and sterile, stony land grows many if
not most trees thriftily: Even at the risk of arousing Western
prejudice, I maintain that New-England, and all broken, hilly, rocky
countries, have a decided advantage (abundantly counterbalanced, no
doubt) over regions of great fertility and nearly uniform facility, in
that human stupidity and mole-eyed greed can never wholly divest them of
forests--that their sterile crags and steep acclivities must mainly be
left to wood forever. Avarice may strip them of their covering of
to-day; but, defying the plow and the spade, they cannot be so denuded
that they will not be speedily reclothed with trees and foliage.
I am not a believer that "Five Acres" or "Ten Acres" suffice for a farm.
I know where money is made on even fewer than five acres; but they who
do it are few, and men of exceptional capacity and diligence. Their
achievements are necessarily confined to the vicinage of cities or
manufacturing villages. The great majority of all who live by
Agriculture want room to turn upon--want to grow grass and keep
stock--and, for such, no mere garden or potato-patch will answer. They
want genuine farms.
Yet, go where you may in this country, you will hear a farmer saying of
his neighbor, "He has too much land," even where the criticism might
justly be reciprocated. We cannot all be mistaken on this head.
There are men who can each manage thousands of acres of tillage, just as
there are those who can skillfully wield an army of a hundred thousand
men. Napoleon said there were two of this class in the Europe of his
day. There are others who cannot handle a hundred acres so that nothing
is lost through neglect or oversight. Rules must be adapted to average
capacities and circumstances. He who expects to live by cattle-rearing
needs many more acres than he who is intent on grain-growing; while he
who contemplates vegetable, root, and fruit culture, needs fewer acres
still. As to the direction of his efforts, each one will be a law unto
himself.
If I were asked, by a young man intent on farming, to indicate the
proper area for him, I would say, _Buy just so large a farm as half
your means will pay for_. In other words, "If you are worth $20,000,
invest half of it in land, the residue in stock, tools, etc.; and
observe the same rule of proportion, whether you be worth $1,000,000 or
only $1,000. If you are worth just nothing at all, I would invest in
land the half of that, and no more. In other words, I would either wait
to earn $500 or over, or push Westward till I found land that costs
practically nothing."
This, then, I take to be the gist of the popular criticism on our
farmers as having unduly enlarged their borders: _They have more land
than they have capital to stock and till to the best advantage._ He who
has but fifty acre has too much if he lets part of his land lie idle and
unproductive for lack of team or hands to till it efficiently; while he
who has a thousand acres has none too much if he has the means and
talents wherewith to make the best of it all.
I have said that I consider the soil of New England as cheap, all things
considered, for him who is able to buy and work it, as that of Minnesota
or Arkansas--that I urge migration to the West only upon those who
cannot pay for farms in the old States. I doubt whether the farmers of
any other section have, in the average, done better, throughout the last
ten years, than the butter-makers of Vermont, the cheese-dairymen of
this State. And yet there is, in the ridgy, rocky, _patchy_ character of
most of our Eastern farms, an insuperable barrier to the most economic,
effective cultivation. If the ridges were further apart--if each rocky
or gravelly knoll were not in close proximity to a strip of bog or
morass--it would be different. But the genius of our age points
unmistakably to cultivation by steam or some other mechanical
application of power; and this requires spacious fields, with few or no
obstacles to the equable progress of the plow. I apprehend that, for
this reason, the growth of bread-corn eastward of the Hudson can never
more be considerably extended, so long as the boundless, fertile
prairies can so easily pour their exhaustless supplies upon us. Fruits,
Vegetables, Roots and Grass, we must continue to grow, probably in
ever-increasing abundance; but we of the East will buy our bread-corn
largely if not mainly from the West.
He, therefore, who bays land in the Eastern States should regard
primarily its capacity to produce those crops in which the East can
never be supplanted--Grass, Fruits, Vegetables, Timber. If a farm will
also produce good Corn or Wheat, that is a recommendation; but let him
place a higher value on those capacities which will be more generally
required and drawn upon.
In the West, the case is different; for, though Wheat-culture still
recedes before the footsteps of advancing population, and Minnesota may
soon cease to grow for others, as Western New-York, Ohio, Indiana, and
Northern Illinois, have already done, yet Indian Corn, being the basis
of both Beef and Pork, will long hold its own in the Valley of the Ohio
and in that of the Upper Mississippi. As it recedes slowly Westward,
Clover and Timothy, Butter and Cheese, will press closely on its
footsteps.
Good neighbors, good roads, good schools, good mechanics at hand, and a
good church within reach, will always be valued and sought: few farmers
are likely to disregard them. Let whoever buys a farm whereon to live,
resolve to buy once for all, and let him not forget that health is not
only wealth but happiness--that an eligible location and a beautiful
prospect are elements of enjoyment not only for ourselves but our
friends; let him not fancy that all the land will soon be gobbled up and
held at exorbitant prices, but believe that money will almost always
command money's worth of whatever may be needed, so that he need not
embarrass himself to-day through fear that he may not be able to find
sellers to-morrow, and he can hardly fail to buy judiciously, and thus
escape that worst species of home-sickness--sickness of home.
VI.
LAYING OFF A FARM--PASTURING.
Whoever finds himself the newly installed owner and occupant of a farm,
should, before doing much beyond growing a crop in the ordinary way,
study well its character, determine its capacities, make himself well
acquainted with its peculiarities of soil and surface, with intent to
make the most of it in his future operations. I would devote at least a
year to this thoughtful observation and study.
To one reared amid the rugged scenery of New-England; or on either slope
of the Allegheny ridge, all prairie farms look alike, just as a European
supposes this to be the case with all negroes. A better acquaintance
will show the average prairie quarter-section by no means an unbroken
meadow, "level as a house-floor," but diversified by water-courses,
"sloughs," and gentle acclivities--sometimes by considerable ravines and
"barrens" or elevated "swales," thinly covered with timber, or brush, or
both. But I will contemplate more especially a Northern farm, made up of
hill and vale or glade, rocky ridge and skirting bog or other low land,
with a wood-lot on the rear or not far distant, and clumps or belts of
timber irregularly lining brook and ravine, or lurking in the angles and
sinuosities of walls and wooden fences, and a ragged, mossy orchard
sheltered in some quiet nook, or sprawling over some gravelly hill-side.
A brook, nearly dry in August, gurgles down the hill-side or winds
through the swamp; while fields, moderately sloping here and nearly
level there, interposed as they can be, have severally been devoted, for
a generation or more, alternately to Grain and Grass--the latter largely
preponderating. We will suppose this farm to measure from 50 to 150
acres.
Now, the young man who has bought or inherited this farm may be wholly
and consciously unable to enter upon any expensive system of improvement
for the next ten years--may fully realize that four or five days of each
week must meantime be given to the growing or earning of present
bread--yet he should none the less study well the capacities and
adaptations of each acre, and mature a comprehensive plan for the
ultimate bringing of each field into the best and most useful condition
whereof it is susceptible, before he cuts a living tree or digs a
solitary drain. He is morally certain of doing something--perhaps many
things--that he will sadly wish undone, if he fails to study
peculiarities and mature a plan before he begins to improve or to fit
his several fields for profitable cultivation.
And the first selection to be made is that of a pasture, since I am
compelled to use an old, familiar name for what should be essentially a
new thing. This pasture should be as near the center of the farm as may
be, and convenient to the barns and barn-yard that are to be. It should
have some shade, but no very young trees; should be dry and rolling,
with an abundance of the purest living water. The smaller this
pasture-lot may be, the better I shall like it, provided you fence it
very stoutly, connect it with the barn-yard by a lane if they are not in
close proximity, and firmly resolve that, outside of this lot, this
lane, this yard and the adjacent stable, your cattle shall never be
seen, unless on the road to market. Very possibly, the day may come
wherein you will decide to dispense with pasturing altogether; but that
is, for the present, improbable. _One_ pasture you will have; if you
live in the broad West, and purpose to graze extensively, it will
doubtless be a large one; but permitting your stock to ramble in Spring
and Fall all over your own fields--(and perhaps your neighbors'
also)--in quest of their needful food, biting off the tops of the finer
young trees, trampling down or breaking off some that are older, rubbing
the bark off of your growing fruit-trees, and doing damage that years
will be required to repair, I most vehemently protest against.
The one great error that misleads and corrupts mankind is the
presumption that _something may be had for nothing_. The average farmer
imagines that whatever of flesh or of milk may accrue to him from the
food his cattle obtain by browsing over his fields or through his
woods, is so much clear gain--that they do the needful work, while he
pockets the net proceeds. But the universe was framed on a plan which
requires so much for so much; and this law will not submit to defiance
or evasion. Under the unnatural, exceptional conditions which environ
the lone squatter on a vast prairie, something may be made by turning
cattle loose and letting them shift for themselves; but this is at best
transitory, and at war with the exigencies of civilization. Whoever
lives within sight of a school-house, or within hearing of a
church-bell, is under the dominion of a law alike inexorable and
beneficent--the law that requires each to pay for all he gets, and reap
only where he has sown.
You can hardly have a pasture so small that it will not afford
hospitality to weeds and prove a source of multiform infestations. The
plants that should mature and be diffused will be kept down to the
earth; those which should be warred upon and eradicated will flourish
untouched, ripen their seed, and diffuse it far and wide. Thistles,
White Daisy, and every plant that impedes tillage and diminishes crops,
are nourished and diffused by means of pastures.
I hold, therefore, that the good farmer will run a mowing-machine over
his pasture twice each Summer--say early in June, and then late in
July--or, if his lot be too rough for this, will have it clipped at
least once with a scythe. Cutting all manner of worthless if not noxious
plants in the blossom, will benefit the soil which their seeding would
tax; it will render the eradication of weeds from your tillage a far
easier task; and it will prevent your being a nuisance to your
neighbors. I am confident that no one who has formed the habit of
keeping down the weeds in his pasture will ever abandon it.
I think each pasture should have (though mine, as yet, has not) a rude
shed or other shelter whereto the cattle may resort in case of storm or
other inclemency. How much they shrink as well as suffer from one cold,
pelting rain, few fully realize; but I am sure that "the merciful man"
who (as the Scripture says) "is merciful to his beast," finds his
humanity a good paying investment. I doubt that the rule would fail,
even in Texas; but I am contemplating civilized husbandry, not the rude
conditions of tropical semi-barbarism. If only by means of stakes and
straw, give cattle a chance to keep dry and warm when they must
otherwise shiver through a rainy, windy day and night on the cold, wet
ground, and I am sure they will pay for it.
In confining a herd of cattle to such narrow limits, I do not intend
that they shall be stinted to what grows there. On the contrary, I
expect them to be fed on Winter Rye, on Cut Grass, on Sowed Corn,
Sorghum, Stalks, Roots, etc., etc., as each shall be in season. With a
good mower, it is a light hour's work before breakfast to cut and cart
to a dozen or twenty head as much grass or corn as they will eat during
the day. But let that point stand over for the present.
VII.
TREES--WOODLAND--FORESTS.
I am not at all sentimental--much less mawkish--regarding the
destruction of trees. Descended from several generations of
timber-cutters (for my paternal ancestors came to America in 1640), and
myself engaged for three years in land-clearing, I realize that trees
exist for use rather than for ornament, and have no more scruple as to
cutting timber in a forest than as to cutting grass in a meadow. Utility
is the reason and end of all vegetable growth--of a hickory's no less
than a corn-stalk's. I have always considered "Woodman, spare that
tree," just about the most mawkish bit of badly versified prose in our
language, and never could guess how it should touch the sensibilities of
any one. Understand, then, that I urge the planting of trees mainly
because I believe it will _pay_, and the preservation, improvement, and
extension, of forests, for precisely that reason.
Yet I am not insensible to the beauty and grace lent by woods, and
groves, and clumps or rows of trees, to the landscape they diversify. I
feel the force of Emerson's averment, that "Beauty is its own excuse
for being," and know that a homestead embowered in, belted by, stately,
graceful elms, maples, and evergreens, is really _worth_ more, and will
sell for more, than if it were naked field and meadow. I consider it one
positive advantage (to balance many disadvantages) of our rocky, hilly,
rugged Eastern country, that it will never, in all probability, be so
denuded of forests as the rich, facile prairies and swales of the Great
Valley may be. Our winds are less piercing, our tornadoes less
destructive, than those of the Great West. I doubt whether there is
another equal area of the earth's surface whereon so many kinds of
valuable trees grow spontaneously and rapidly, defying eradication, as
throughout New England and on either slope of the Alleghenies; and this
profusion of timber and foliage may well atone for, or may be fairly
weighed against, many deficiencies and drawbacks. The Yankee, who has
been accustomed to see trees spring up spontaneously wherever they were
not kept down by ax, or plow, or scythe, and to cross running water
every half mile of a Summer day's journey, may well be made homesick, by
two thousand miles of naked, dusty, wind-swept Plains, whereon he finds
no water for fifty to a hundred miles, and knows it impossible to cut an
ax-helve, much more an axle-tree, in the course of a wearying journey.
No Eastern farmer ever realized the blessedness of abundant and
excellent wood and water until he had wandered far from his boyhood's
home.
No one may yet be able fully to explain the inter-dependence of these
two blessings; but the fact remains. All over "the Plains," there is
evidence that trees grew and flourished where none are now found, and
that springs and streams were then frequent and abiding where none now
exist. A prominent citizen of Nevada, who explored southward from Austin
to the Colorado, assured me that his party traveled for days in the bed
of what had once been a considerable river, but in which it was evident
that no water had flowed for years. And I have heard that since the
Mormons have planted trees over considerable sections of Utah, rains in
Summer are no longer rare, and Salt Lake evinces, by a constant though
moderate increase of her volume of waters, that the equilibrium of
rain-fall with evaporation in the Great Basin has been fully
restored--or rather, that the rain-fall is now taking the lead.
I have a firm faith that all the great deserts of the Temperate and
Torrid Zones will yet be reclaimed by irrigation and tree-planting. The
bill which Congress did not pass, nor really consider, whereby it was
proposed, some years since, to give a section of the woodless Public
Lands remote from settlement to every one who, in a separate township,
would plant and cherish a quarter-section of choice forest-trees, ought
to have been passed--with modifications, perhaps, but preserving the
central idea. Had ten thousand quarter-sections, in so many different
townships of the Plains, been thus planted to timber ten to twenty
years ago, and protected from fire and devastation till now, the value
of those Plains for settlement would have been nearly or quite doubled.
A capital mistake, it seems to me, is being made by some of the dairy
farmers of our own State. One who has a hundred acres of good soil,
whereof twenty or thirty are wooded, cuts off his timber entirely,
calculating that the additional grass that he may grow in its stead will
pay for all the coal he needs for fuel, so that he will make a net gain
of the time he has hitherto devoted each Winter to cutting and hauling
wood. He does not consider how much his soil will lose in Summer
moisture, how his springs and runnels will be dried up, nor how the
sweep of harsh winds will be intensified, by baring his hill-tops and
ravines to sun and breeze so utterly. In my deliberate judgment, a farm
of one hundred acres will yield _more_ feed, with far greater uniformity
of product from year to year, if twenty acres of its ridge-crests,
ravine-sides, and rocky places, are thickly covered with timber, than if
it be swept clean of trees and all devoted to grass. Hence, I insist
that the farmer who sweeps off his wood and resolves to depend on coal
for fuel, hoping to increase permanently the product of his dairy, makes
a sad miscalculation.
Spain, Italy, and portions of France, are now suffering from the
improvidence that devoured their forests, leaving the future to take
care of itself. I presume the great empires of antiquity suffered from
the same folly, though to a much greater extent. The remains of now
extinct races who formerly peopled and tilled the central valleys of
this continent, and especially the Territory of Arizona, probably bear
witness to a similar recklessness, which is paralleled by our fathers'
and our own extermination of the magnificent forests of White Pine
which, barely a century ago, covered so large a portion of the soil of
our Northern States. Vermont sold White Pine abundantly to England
through Canada within my day: she is now supplying her own wants from
Canada at a cost of not less than five times the price she sold for; and
she will be paying still higher rates before the close of this century.
I entreat our farmers not to preserve every tree, good, bad, or
indifferent, that may happen to be growing on their lands--but, outside
of the limited districts wherein the primitive forest must still be cut
away in order that land may be obtained for cultivation, to _plant and
rear at least two better trees for every one they may be impelled to cut
down_. How this may, in the average, be most judiciously done, I will
try to indicate in the succeeding chapter.
VIII.
GROWING TIMBER--TREE-PLANTING.
In my judgment, the proportion of a small farm that should be constantly
devoted to trees (other than fruit) is not less than one-fourth; while,
of farms exceeding one hundred acres in area, that proportion should be
not less than one-third, and may often be profitably increased to
one-half. I am thinking of such as are in good part superficially rugged
and rocky, or sandy and sterile, such as New-England, eastern New-York,
northern New-Jersey, with both slopes of the Alleghenies, as well as the
western third of our continent, abound in. It may be that it is
advisable to be content with a smaller proportion of timber in the
Prairie States and the broad, fertile intervales which embosom most of
our great rivers for at least a part of their course; but I doubt it.
And there is scarcely a farm in the whole country, outside of the great
primitive forests in which openings have but recently been made, in
which _some_ tree-planting is not urgently required.
"Too much land," you will hear assigned on every side as a reason for
poor farming and meager crops. Ask an average farmer in New-England, in
Virginia, in Kentucky, or in Alabama, why the crops of his section are
in the average no better, and the answer, three times in four, will be,
"Our farmers have too much land"--that is, not too much absolutely, but
too much relatively to their capital, stock, and general ability to till
effectively. The habitual grower of poor crops will proffer this
explanation quite as freely and frequently as his more thrifty neighbor.
And what every one asserts must have a basis of truth.
Now, I do not mean to quarrel with the instinct which prompts my
countrymen to buy and hold too much land. They feel, as I do, that land
is still cheap almost anywhere in this country--cheap, if not in view of
the income now derived from it, certainly in contemplation of the price
it must soon command and the income it might, under better management,
be made to yield. Under this conviction--or, if you please,
impression--every one is intent on holding on to more land than he can
profitably till, if not more than he can promptly pay for.
What I _do_ object to is simply this--that thousands, who have more land
than they have capital to work profitably, will persist in half-tilling
many acres, instead of thoroughly farming one-half or one third so many,
and getting the rest into wood so fast as may be. I am confident that
two-thirds of all our farmers would improve their circumstances and
increase their incomes by concentrating their efforts, their means,
their fertilizers, upon half to two-thirds of the area they now skim and
skin, and giving the residue back to timber-growing.
In my own hilly, rocky, often boggy, Westchester--probably within six of
being the oldest Agricultural County in the Union--I am confident that
ten thousand acres might to-morrow be given back to forest with profit
to the owners and advantage to all its inhabitants. It is a
fruit-growing, milk-producing, truck-farming county, closely adjoining
the greatest city of the New World; hence, one wherein land can be
cultivated as profitably as almost anywhere else--yet I am satisfied
that half its surface may be more advantageously devoted to timber than
to grass or tillage. Nay; I doubt that one acre in a hundred of rocky
land--that is, land ribbed or dotted with rocks that the bar or the
rock-hook cannot lift from their beds, and which it will not as yet pay
to blast--is now tilled to profit, or ever will be until it shall be
found advisable to clear them utterly of stone breaking through or
rising within two feet of the surface. The time will doubtless arrive in
which many fields will pay for clearing of stone that would not to-day;
these, I urge, should be given up to wood now, and kept wooded until the
hour shall have struck for ridding them of every impediment to the
steady progress of both the surface and the subsoil plow.
Were all the rocky crests and rugged acclivities of this County
bounteously wooded once more, and kept so for a generation, our floods
would be less injurious, our springs unfailing, and our streams more
constant and equable; our blasts would be less bitter, and our gales
less destructive to fruit; we should have vastly more birds to delight
us by their melody and aid us in our not very successful war with
devouring insects; we should grow peaches, cherries, and other delicate
fruits, which the violent caprices of our seasons, the remorseless
devastations of our visible and invisible insect enemies, have all but
annihilated; and we should keep more cows and make more milk on
two-thirds of the land now devoted to grass than we actually do from the
whole of it. And what is true of Westchester is measurably true of every
rural county in the Union.
I have said that I believe in cutting trees as well as in growing them;
I have not said, and do not mean to say, that I believe in cutting
everything clean as you go. That was once proper in Westchester; it is
still advisable in forest-covered regions, where the sun must be let in
before crops can be grown; but, in nine cases out of ten, timber should
be thinned or culled out rather than cut off; and, for every tree taken
away, at least two should be planted or set out.
We have pretty well outgrown the folly of letting every apple-tree bear
such fruit as it will; though in the orchard of my father's little farm
in Amherst, N. H., whereon I was born, no tree had ever been grafted
when I bade adieu to it in 1820; and I presume none has been to this
day. By this time, almost every farmer realizes that he _can't afford_
to grow little, gnarly, villainously sour or detestably bitter-sweet
apples, when, by duly setting a graft at a cost of two dimes, he may
make that identical tree yield Greenings or Pippins at least as
bounteously. I presume the cumulative experience of fifty or sixty
generations of apple-growers has ripened this conclusion. Why do they
not infer readily and generally that growing indifferent timber where
the best and most valued would grow as rapidly, is a stupid, costly
blunder? It seems to me that whoever has attained the conviction that
apple-trees should be grafted ought to know that it is wasteful to grow
Red Oak, Beech, White Maple, and Alder, where White Oak, Hickory,
Locust, and White Pine, might be grown with equal facility, in equal
luxuriance, provided the right seeds were planted, and a little pains
taken to keep down, for a year or two, the shoots spontaneously sent up
by the wrong ones.
North of the Potomac, and east of the Ohio, and (I presume) in limited
districts elsewhere, rocky, sterile woodlands, costing $2 to $50 per
acre according to location, etc., are to-day the cheapest property to be
bought in the United States. Even though nothing were done with them but
keep out fire and cattle, and let the young trees grow as they will,
money can be more profitably and safely invested in lands covered by
young timber than in anything else. The parent, who would invest a few
thousands for the benefit of children or grandchildren still young, may
buy woodlands which will be worth twenty times their present cost within
the next twenty years. But better even than this would it be to buy up
rocky, craggy, naked hill-sides and eminences which have been pastured
to death, and, shutting out cattle inflexibly, scratch these over with
plow, mattock, hoe, or pick, as circumstances shall dictate, plant them
thickly with Chestnut, Walnut, Hickory, White Oak, and the seeds of
Locust and White Pine. I say Locust, though not yet certain that this
tree must not be started in garden or nursery-beds and transplanted when
two or three years old, so puny and feeble is it at the outset, and so
likely to be smothered under leaves or killed out by its more favored
neighbors. I have experiments in progress not yet matured, which may
shed light on this point before I finish these essays.
_Plant thickly_, and of diverse kinds, so as to cover the ground
promptly and choke out weeds and shrubs, with full purpose to thin and
prune as circumstances shall dictate.
Many farmers are averse to planting timber, because (they think) nothing
can be realized therefrom for the next twenty or thirty years, which is
as long as they expect to live. But this is a grave miscalculation. Let
us suppose a rocky, hilly pasture-lot of ten or twenty acres rudely
scratched over as I have suggested, and thickly seeded with hickory nuts
and white oak acorns only: within five years, it will yield abundantly
of hoop poles, though the better, more promising half be left to
mature, as they should be; two years later, another and larger crop of
hoop-poles may be cut, still sparing the best; and thenceforth a
valuable crop of timber may be taken from that land; for, if cut at the
proper season, at least two thrifty sprouts will start from every stump;
and so that wood will yield a clear income each year while its best
trees are steadily growing and maturing. I do not advise restriction to
those two species of timber; but I insist that a young plantation of
forest-trees may and should yield a clear income in every year after its
fourth.
As to the Far West--the Plains, the Parks, and the Great Basin--there is
more money to be made by dotting them with groves of choice timber than
by working the richest veins of the adjacent mountains. Whoever will
promptly start, near a present or prospective railroad, forty acres of
choice trees--Hickory, White Oak, Locust, Chestnut, and White
Pine--within a circuit of three hundred miles from Denver, on land which
he has made or is making provision to irrigate--may begin to sell trees
therefrom two years hence, and persist in selling annually henceforth
for a century--at first, for transplanting; very soon, for a variety of
uses in addition to that.
* * * * *
--But this paper grows too long, and I must postpone to the next my more
especial suggestions to young farmers with regard to tree-planting.
IX.
PLANTING AND GROWING TREES.
Whoever has recently bought, inherited, or otherwise become the owner of
a farm, has usually found some part or parts of it devoted to wood; and
this, if not in excess, he will mainly preserve, while he studies and
plans with a view to the ultimate devotion to timber of just those
portions of his land that are best adapted to that use. In locating that
timber, I would have him consider these suggestions:
I. Land wisely planted with trees, and fenced so far as need be to keep
out cattle, costs nothing. Whatever else you grow involves labor and
expenditure; trees grow of their own accord. You may neglect them
utterly--may wander over the earth and be absent for ten or twenty
years, while your fences decay and your fields are overcropped to
exhaustion; even your meadows may be run out by late mowing and close
feeding at both ends of the season, till a dozen acres will hardly
subsist a span of horses and a cow; but your woods need only to be let
alone to insure that their value shall have decidedly increased during
your absence. They will richly reward labor and care in thinning,
trimming, and transplanting--you may profitably employ in them any time
that you can spare them--but they will do very well if simply let alone.
And, unlike any other product with which I am acquainted, you may take
crop after crop of wood from the same lot, and the soil will be richer
and more productive after the last than it was before the first. Whether
wholly because their roots permeate and break up the soil during their
life and enrich it in their decay, or for diverse reasons, it is
certainly true that land--and especially _poor_ land--is enriched by
growing upon it a crop of almost any timber, the evergreens possibly
excepted. So, should you ever have land that you cannot till to profit,
whether because it is too poor, or because you have a sufficiency that
is better, you should at once devote it to wood.
II. Your springs and streams will be rendered more equable and enduring
by increasing the area and the luxuriance of your timber. They may have
become scanty and capricious under a policy of reckless, wholesale
destruction of trees; they will be reenforced and reinvigorated by
doubling the area of your woods, while quadrupling the number, and
increasing the average size, of your trees.
III. All ravines and steep hill-sides should be devoted to trees. Every
acre too rocky to be thoroughly cleared of stone and plowed should be
set apart for tree-growing. Wherever the soil will be gullied or washed
away by violent rains if under tillage, it should be excluded from
cultivation and given up to trees. Men often doubt the profit of heavy
manuring; and well they may, if three-fourths of the fertilizers applied
are soaked out and swept away by flooding rains or sudden thaws and
floated off to some distant sea or bay; but let all that is applied to
the soil only remain there till it is carted away in crops, and it will
hardly be possible to manure too highly for profit.
IV. Trees, especially evergreens, may be so disposed as to modify
agreeably the average temperature of your farm, or at least of the most
important parts of it. When I bought my place--or rather the first
installment of it--the best spot I could select for a garden lay at the
foot of a hill which half surrounded it on the south and east, leaving
it exposed to the full sweep of north and north-west winds; so that,
though the soil was gravelly and warm, my garden was likely to be cold
and backward. To remedy this, I planted four rows of evergreens (Balsam
Fir, Pine, Red Cedar, and Hemlock), along a low ridge bounding it on the
north, following an inward curve of the ridge at its west end; and those
evergreens have in sixteen years grown into very considerable trees,
forming a shady, cleanly, inviting bower, or sylvan retreat, daintily
carpeted with the fallen leaves of the overhanging firs. I judge that
the average temperature of the soil for some yards southward of this
wind-break is at least five degrees higher, throughout the growing
season, than it formerly was or would now be if these evergreens were
swept away; while the aspect of the place is agreeably diversified, and
even beautified, by their appearance. I believe it would sell for some
hundreds of dollars more with than without that thrifty, growing clump
of evergreens.
V. I have already urged, though not strongly enough, that crops, as well
as springs, will be improved by keeping the crests of ridges thickly
wooded, thus depositing moisture in Winter and Spring, to be slowly
yielded to the adjacent slopes during the heat and drouth of Summer. I
firmly believe that the slopes of a hill whose crest is heavily wooded
will yield larger average crops than slope and crest together would do
if both were bare of trees.
VI. The banks of considerable streams, ponds, etc., may often be so
planted with trees that these will shade more water than land, to the
comfort and satisfaction of the fish, and the protection of those banks
from abrasion by floods and rapid currents. Sycamore, Elm, and Willow,
do well here; if choice Grape-Vines are set beside and allowed to run
over some of them, the effect is good, and the grapes acceptable to man
and bird.
VII. Never forget that a good tree grows as thriftily and surely as a
poor one. Many a farmer has to-day ten to forty acres of indifferent
cord-wood where he might, at a very slight cost, have had instead an
equal quantity of choice timber, worth ten times as much. Hickory,
Chestnut, and Walnut, while they yield nuts that can be eaten or sold,
are worth far more as timber than an equal bulk of Beech, Birch,
Hemlock, or Red Oak. Chestnut has more than doubled in value within the
last few years, mainly because it has been found excellent for the
inside wood-work of dwellings. Locust also seems to be increasing in
value. Ten acres of large, thrifty Locust near this City would now buy a
pretty good farm; as I presume it would, if located near any of our
great cities.
VIII. Where several good varieties of Timber are grown together, some
insect or atmospheric trouble may blast one of them, yet leave the
residue alive and hearty. And, if all continue thrifty, some may be cut
out and sold, leaving others more room to grow and rapidly attain a
vigorous maturity.
IX. Wherever timber has become scarce and valuable, a wood-lot should be
thinned out, nevermore cleared off, unless it is to be devoted to a
different use. It seems to me that destroying a forest because we want
timber is like smothering a hive of bees because we want honey.
X. Timber should be cut with intelligent reference to the future. Locust
and other valuable trees that it is desirable should throw up shoots
from the stump, and rapidly reproduce their kind, should be cut in March
or April; while trees that you want to exterminate should be cut in
August, so that they may _not_ sprout. There may be exceptions to this
rule; but I do not happen to recollect any. Evergreens do not sprout;
and I think these should be cut in Winter--at all events, not in Spring,
when full of sap and thus prone to rapid decay.
XI. Your plantation will furnish pleasant and profitable employment at
almost any season. I doubt that any one in this country has ever yet
bestowed so much labor and care on a young forest as it will amply
reward. Sow your seeds thickly; begin to thin the young trees when they
are a foot high, and to trim them so soon as they are three feet, and
you may have thousands thriving on a fertile acre, and pushing their
growth upward with a rapidity and to an altitude outrunning all
preconception.
XII. Springs and streams will soon appear where none have appeared and
endured for generations, when we shall have reclothed the nakedness of
the Plains with adequate forests. Rains will become moderately frequent
where they are now rare, and confined to the season when they are of
least use to the husbandman.
I may have more to say of trees by-and-by, but rest here for the
present. The importance of the topic can hardly be overrated.
X.
DRAINING--MY OWN.
My farm is in the township of Newcastle, Westchester County, N. Y., 35
miles from our City Hall, and a little eastward of the hamlet known as
Chappaqua, called into existence by a station on the Harlem Railroad. It
embraces the south-easterly half of the marsh which the railroad here
traverses from south to north--my part measuring some fifteen acres,
with five acres more of slightly elevated dry land between it and the
foot of the rather rugged hill which rises thence on the east and on the
south, and of which I now own some fifty acres, lying wholly eastward of
my low land, and in good part covered with forest. Of this, I bought
more than half in 1853, and the residue in bits from time to time as I
could afford it. The average cost was between $130 and $140 per acre:
one small and poor old cottage being the only building I found on the
tract, which consisted of the ragged edges of two adjacent farms,
between the western portions of which mine is now interposed, while they
still adjoin each other beyond the north and south road, half a mile
from the railroad, on which their buildings are located and which forms
my eastern boundary. My stony, gravelly upland mainly slopes to the
west; but two acres on my east line incline toward the road which bounds
me in that direction, while two more on my south-east corner descend to
the little brook which, entering at that corner, keeps irregularly near
my south line, until it emerges, swelled by a smaller runnel that enters
my lowland from the north and traverses it to meet and pass off with the
larger brooklet aforesaid. I have done some draining, to no great
purpose, on the more level portions of my upland; but my lowland has
challenged my best efforts in this line, and I shall here explain them,
for the encouragement and possible guidance of novices in draining. Let
me speak first of
_My Difficulties._--This marsh or bog consisted, when I first grappled
with it, of some thirty acres, whereof I then owned less than a third.
To drain it to advantage, one person should own it all, or the different
owners should cooperate; but I had to go it alone, with no other aid
than a freely accorded privilege of straightening as well as deepening
the brook which wound its way through the dryer meadow just below me,
forming here the boundary of two adjacent farms. I spent $100 on this
job, which is still imperfect; but the first decided fall in the stream
occurs nearly a mile below me; and you tire easily of doing at your own
cost work which benefits several others as much as yourself. My
drainage will never be perfect till this brook, with that far larger
one in which it is merged sixty rods below me, shall have been sunk
three or four feet, at a further expense of at least $500.
This bog or swamp, when I first bought into it, was mainly dedicated to
the use of frogs, muskrats and snapping-turtles. A few small water-elms
and soft maples grew upon it, with swamp alder partly fringing the
western base of the hill east of it, where the rocks which had, through
thousands of years, rolled from the hill, thickly covered the surface,
with springs bubbling up around and among them. Decaying stumps and
imbedded fragments of trees argued that timber formerly covered this
marsh as well as the encircling hills. A tall, dense growth of
blackberry briers, thoroughwort, and all manner of marsh-weeds and
grasses, covered the center of the swamp each Summer; but my original
portion of it, being too wet for these, was mainly addicted to hassocks
or tussocks of wiry, worthless grass; their matted roots rising in hard
bunches a few inches above the soft, bare, encircling mud. The bog
ranged in depth from a few inches to five or six feet, and was composed
of black, peaty, vegetable mold, diversified by occasional streaks of
clay or sand, all resting on a substratum of hard, coarse gravel, out of
which two or three springs bubbled up, in addition to the half a dozen
which poured in from the east, and a tiny rivulet which (except in a
very dry, hot time) added the tribute of three or four more, which
sprang from the base of a higher shelf of the hill near the middle of
what is now my farm. Add to these that the brook which brawled and
foamed down my hill-side near my south line as aforesaid, had brought
along an immensity of pebbles and gravel of which it had mainly formed
my five acres of dryer lowland, had thus built up a pretty swale,
whereon it had the bad habit of filling up one channel, and then cutting
another, more devious and eccentric, if possible, than any of its
predecessors--and you have some idea of the obstacles I encountered and
resolved to overcome. One of my first substantial improvements was the
cutting of a straight channel for this current and, by walling it with
large stones, compelling the brook to respect necessary limitations. It
was not my fault that some of those stones were set nearly upright, so
as to veneer the brook rather than thoroughly constrain it: hence, some
of the stones, undermined by strong currents, were pitched forward into
the brook by high Spring freshets, so as to require resetting more
carefully. This was a mistake, but, not one of
_My Blunders._--These, the natural results of inexperience and haste,
were very grave. Not only had I had no real experience in draining when
I began, but I could hire no foreman who know much more of it than I
did. I ought to have begun by securing an ample and sure fall where the
water left my land, and next cut down the brooklet or open ditch into
which I intended to drain to the lowest practicable point--so low, at
least, that no drain running into it should ever be troubled with
back-water. Nothing can be more useless than a drain in which water
stagnates, choking it with mud. Then I should have bought hundreds of
Hemlock or other cheap boards, slit them to a width of four or five
inches, and, having opened the needed drains, laid these in the bottom
and the tile thereupon, taking care to _break joint_, by covering the
meeting ends of two boards with the middle of a tile. Laying tile in the
soft mud of a bog, with nothing beneath to prevent their sinking, is
simply throwing away labor and money. I cannot wonder that tile-draining
seems to many a humbug, seeing that so many tile are laid so that they
can never do any good.
Having, by successive purchases, become owner of fully half of this
swamp, and by repeated blunders discovered that making stone drains in a
bog, while it is a capital mode of getting rid of the stone, is no way
at all to dry the soil, I closed my series of experiments two years
since by carefully relaying my generally useless tile on good strips of
board, sinking them just as deep as I could persuade the water to run
off freely, and, instead of allowing them to discharge into a brooklet
or open ditch, connecting each with a covered main of four to six-inch
tile; these mains discharging into the running brook which drains all my
farm and three or four of those above it just where it runs swiftly off
from my land. If a thaw or heavy rain swells the brook (as it sometimes
will) so that it rises above my outlet aforesaid, the strong current
formed by the concentration of the clear contents of so many drains will
not allow the muddy water of the brook to back into it so many as three
feet at most; and any mud or sediment that may be deposited there will
be swept out clean whenever the brook shall have fallen to the drainage
level. For this and similar excellent devices, I am indebted to the
capital engineering and thorough execution of Messrs. Chickering & Gall,
whose work on my place has seldom required mending, and never called for
reconstruction.
_My Success._--I judge that there are not many tracts more difficult to
drain than mine was, considering all the circumstances, except those
which are frequently flowed by tides or the waters of some lake, or
river. Had I owned the entire swamp, or had there been a fall in the
brook just below me, had I had any prior experience in draining, or had
others equally interested cooperated in the good work, my task would
have been comparatively light. As it was, I made mistakes which
increased the cost and postponed the success of my efforts; but this is
at length complete. I had seven acres of Indian Corn, one of Corn
Fodder, two of Oats, and seven or eight acres of Grass, on my lowland in
1869; and, though the Spring months were quite rainy, and the latter
part of Summer rather dry, my crops were all good. I did not see better
in Westchester County; and I shall be quite content with as good
hereafter. Of my seven hundred bushels of Corn (ears,) I judge that
two-thirds would be accounted fit for seed anywhere; my Grass was cut
twice, and yielded one large crop and another heavier than the average
first crop throughout our State. My drainage will require some care
henceforth; but the fifteen acres I have reclaimed from utter
uselessness and obstructions are decidedly the best part of my farm,
Uplands may be exhausted; these never can be.
The experience of another season (1870) of protracted drouth has fully
justified my most sanguine expectations. I had this year four acres of
Corn, and as many of Oats, on my swamp, with the residue in Grass; and
they were all good. I estimate my first Hay-crop at over two and a half
tuns per acre, while the rowen or aftermath barely exceeded half a tun
per acre, because of the severity of the drouth, which began in July and
lasted till October. My Oats were good, but not remarkably so; and I had
810 bushels of ears of sound, ripe Corn from four acres of drained swamp
and two and a half of upland. I estimate my upland Corn at seventy
(shelled) bushels, and my lowland at fifty-five (shelled) bushels per
acre. Others, doubtless, had more, despite the unpropitious season; but
my crop was a fair one, and I am content with it. My upland Corn was
heavily manured; my lowland but moderately. There are many to tell you
how much I lose by my farming; I only say that, as yet, no one else has
lost a farthing by it, and I do not complain.
XI.
DRAINING GENERALLY.
Having narrated my own experience in draining with entire unreserve, I
here submit the general conclusions to which it has led me:
I. While I doubt that there is _any_ land above water that would not be
improved by a good system of underdrains, I am sure that there is a
great deal that could not at present be drained to profit. Forests,
hill-side pastures, and most dry gravelly or sandy tracts, I place in
this category. Perhaps one-third of New-England, half of the Middle
States, and three-fourths of the Mississippi Valley, may ultimately be
drained with profit.
II. _All_ swamp lands without exception, nearly all clay soils, and a
majority of the flat or gently rolling lands of this country, must
eventually be drained, if they are to be tilled with the best results. I
doubt that there is a garden on earth that would not be (unless it
already had been) improved by thorough underdraining.
III. The uses of underdrains are many and diverse. To carry off surplus
water, though the most obvious, stands by no means alone. 1.
Underdrained land may be plowed and sowed considerably earlier in Spring
than undrained soil of like quality. 2. Drained fields lose far less
than others of their fertility by washing. 3. They are not so liable to
be gullied by sudden thaws or flooding rains. 4. Where a field has been
deeply subsoiled, I am confident that it will remain mellow and
permeable by roots longer than if undrained. 5. Less water being
evaporated from drained than from undrained land, the soil will be
warmer throughout the growing season; hence, the crop will be heavier,
and will mature earlier. 6. Being more porous and less compact, I think
the soil of a drained field retains more moisture in a season of drouth,
and its growing plants suffer less therefrom, than if it were undrained.
In short, I thoroughly believe in underdraining.
IV. Yet I advise no man to run into debt for draining, as I can imagine
a mortgage on a farm so heavy and pressing as to be even a greater
nuisance than stagnant water in its soil. Labor and tile are dear with
us; I do not expect that either will ever be so cheap here as in England
or Belgium. What I _would_ have each farmer in moderate circumstances do
is to _drain his wettest field_ next Fall--that is, after finishing his
haying and before cutting up his corn--taking care to secure abundant
fall to carry off the water in time of flood, and doing his work
thoroughly. Having done this, let him subsoil deeply, fertilize amply,
till carefully, and watch the result. I think it will soon satisfy him
that such draining pays.
V. I do not insist on tile as making the only good drain; but I have had
no success with any other. The use of stone, in my opinion, is only
justified where the field to be drained abounds in them and no other use
can be made of them. To make a good drain with ordinary boulders or
cobble-stones requires twice the excavation and involves twice the labor
necessarily expended on tile-draining; and it is neither so effective
nor so durable. Earth will be carried by water into a stone drain; rats
and other vermin will burrow in it and dig (or enlarge) holes thence to
the surface; in short, it is not the thing. Better drain with stone
where they are a nuisance than not at all; but I predict that you will
dig them up after giving them a fair trial and replace them with tile.
In a wooded country, where tile were scarce and dear, I should try
draining with slabs or cheap boards dressed to a uniform width of six or
eight inches, and laid in a ditch dug with banks inclined or sloped to
the bottom, so as to form a sort of V; the lower edge of the two
side-slabs coming together at the bottom, and a third being laid widely
across their upper edges, so as to form a perfect cap or cover. In firm,
hard soil, this would prove an efficient drain, and, if well made, would
last twenty years. Uniformity of temperature and of moisture would keep
the slabs tolerably sound for at least so long; and, if the top of this
drain were two feet below the surface, no plowing or trampling over it
would harm it.
VI. As to draining by what is called a Mole Plow, which simply makes a
waterway through the subsoil at a depth of three feet or thereabout, I
have no acquaintance with it but by hearsay. It seems to me morally
impossible that drains so made should not be lower at some points than
at others, so as to retain their fill of water instead of carrying it
rapidly off; and I am sure that plowing, or even carting heavy loads
over them, must gradually choke and destroy them. Yet this kind of
draining is comparatively so cheap, and may, with a strong team, be
effected so rapidly, that I can account for its popularity, especially
in prairie regions. Where the subsoil is rocky, it is impracticable;
where it is hard-pan, it must be very difficult; where it is loose sand,
it cannot endure; but in clays or heavy loams, it may, for a few years,
render excellent service. I wish the heavy clays of Vermont, more
especially of the Champlain basin, were well furrowed or pierced by even
such drains; for I am confident that they would temporarily improve both
soil and crop; and, if they soon gave out, they would probably be
replaced by others more durable.
--I shall not attempt to give instructions in drain-making; but I urge
every novice in the art to procure Waring's or some other work on the
subject and study it carefully: then, if he can obtain at a fair price
the services of an experienced drainer, hire him to supervise the work.
One point only do I insist on--that is, draining into a main rather than
an open ditch or brook; for it is difficult in this or any harsher
climate to prevent the crumbling of your outlet tile by frost. Below the
Potomac or the Arkansas, this may not be apprehended; and there it may
be best to have your drains separately discharge from a road-side bank
or into an open ditch, as they will thus inhale more air, and so help
(in Summer) to warm and moisten the soil above them; but in our climate
I believe it better to let your drains discharge into a covered main or
mains as aforesaid, than into an open ditch or brook.
Tile and labor are dear with us; I presume labor will remain so. But, in
our old States, there are often laborers lacking employment in November
and the Winter months; and it is the wisest and truest charity to
proffer them pay for work. Some will reject it unless the price be
exorbitant; but there are scores of the deserving poor in almost every
rural county, who would rather earn a dollar per day than hang around
the grog-shops waiting for Spring. Get your tiles when you can, or do
not get them at all, but let it be widely known that you have work for
those who will do it for the wages you can afford, and you will soon
have somebody to earn your money. Having staked out your drains, set
these to work at digging them, even though you should not be able to
tile them for a year. Cut your outlet deep, and your land will profit by
a year of open drains.
XII.
IRRIGATION--MEANS AND ENDS.
While few can have failed to realize the important part played by Water
in the economy of vegetation, I judge that the question--"How can I
secure to my growing plants a sufficiency of moisture at all
times?"--has not always presented itself to the farmer's mind as
demanding of him a practical solution. To rid his soil and keep it free
of superfluous, but especially of stagnant water, he may or may not
accept as a necessity; but that, having provided for draining away
whatever is excessive, he should turn a short corner and begin at once
to provide that water shall be supplied to his fields and plants
whenever they may need it, he is often slow to apprehend. Yet this
provision is but the counterpart and complement of the other.
I had sped across Europe to Venice, and noted with interest the
admirable, effective irrigation of the great plain of Lombardy, before I
could call any land my own. I saw there a region perhaps thirty miles
wide by one hundred and fifty along the east bank of the Po, rising very
gently thence to the foot of the Austrian Alps, which Providence seems
to have specially adapted to be improved by irrigation. The torrents of
melted snow which in Spring leap and foam adown the southern face of the
Alps, bringing with them the finer particles of soil, are suddenly
arrested and form lakes (Garda, Maggiore, Como, etc.) just as they
emerge upon the plain. These lakes, slowly rising, often overflow their
banks, with those of the small rivers that bear their waters westward to
the Po; and this overflow was a natural source of abiding fertility. To
dam these outlets, and thus control their currents, was a very simple
and obvious device of long ago, and was probably begun by a very few
individuals (if by more than one), whose success incited emulation,
until the present extensive and costly system of irrigating dams and
canals was gradually developed. When I traversed Lombardy in July, 1851,
the beds of streams naturally as large as the Pemigewasset, Battenkill,
Canada Creek, or Humboldt, were utterly dry; the water which would
naturally have flowed therein being wholly transferred to an irrigating
canal (or to canals) often two or three miles distant. The reservoirs
thus created were filled in Spring, when the streams were fullest and
their water richest, and gradually drawn upon throughout the later
growing season to cover the carefully leveled and graded fields on
either side to the depth of an inch or two at a time. If any failed to
be soon absorbed by the soil, it was drawn off as here superfluous, and
added to the current employed to moisten and fertilize the field next
below it; and so field after field was refreshed and enriched, to the
husbandman's satisfaction and profit. It may be that the rich glades of
English Lancashire bear heavier average crops; but those of Lombardy are
rarely excelled on the globe.
Why should not our Atlantic slope have its Lombardy? Utah, Nevada, and
California, exhibit raw, crude suggestions of such a system; but why
should the irrigation of the New World be confined to regions where it
is indispensable, when that of the Old is not? I know no good reason
whatever for leaving an American field unirrigated where water to flow
it at will can be had at a moderate cost.
When I first bought land (in 1853) I fully purposed to provide for
irrigating my nearly level acres at will, and I constructed two dams
across my upland stream with that view; but they were so badly planned
that they went off in the flood caused by a tremendous rain the next
Spring; and, though I rebuilt one of them, I submitted to a
miscalculation which provided for taking the water, by means of a
syphon, out of the pond at the top and over the bank that rose fifteen
or twenty feet above the surface of the water. Of course, air would work
into the pipe after it had carried a stream unexceptionably for two or
three days, and then the water would run no longer. Had I taken it from
the bottom of the pond through my dam, it would have run forever, (or so
long as there was water covering its inlet in the pond;) but bad
engineering flung me; and I have never since had the heart (or the
means) to revise and correct its errors.
My next attempt was on a much humbler scale, and I engineered it myself.
Toward the north end of my farm, the hill-side which rises east of my
lowland is broken by a swale or terrace, which gives me three or four
acres of tolerably level upland, along the upper edge of which five or
six springs, which never wholly fail, burst from the rocks above and
unite to form a petty runnel, which dries up in very hot or dry weather,
but which usually preserved a tiny stream to be lost in the swamp below.
North of the gully cut down the lower hill-side by this streamlet, the
hill-side of some three acres is quite steep, still partially wooded,
and wholly devoted to pasturage. Making a petty dam across this runnel
at the top of the lower acclivity, I turned the stream aside, so that it
should henceforth run along the crest of this lower hill, falling off
gradually so as to secure a free current, and losing its contents at
intervals through variable depressions in its lower bank. Dam and
artificial water-course together cost me $90, which was about twice what
it should have been. That rude and petty contrivance has now been ten
years in operation, and may have cost $5 per annum for oversight and
repairs. Its effect has been to double the grass grown on the two acres
it constantly irrigates, for which I paid $280, or more than thrice the
cost of my irrigation. But more: my hill-side, while it was well
grassed in Spring, always gave out directly after the first dry, or hot
week; so that, when I most needed feed, it afforded none; its herbage
being parched up and dead, and thus remaining till refreshed by generous
rains. I judge, therefore, that my irrigation has _more_ than doubled
the product of those two acres, and that these are likely to lose
nothing in yield or value so long as that petty irrigating ditch shall
be maintained.
I know this is small business. But suppose each of the hundred thousand
New-England farms, whereof five to ten acres might be thus irrigated at
a cost not exceeding $100 per farm, had been similarly prepared to flow
those acres last Spring and early Summer, with an average increase
therefrom of barely one tun of Hay (or its equivalent in pasturage) per
acre. The 500,000 tuns of Hay thus realized would have saved 200,000
head of cattle from being sent to the butcher while too thin for good
beef, while every one of them was required for further use, and will
have to be replaced at a heavy cost. Shall not these things be
considered? Shall not all who can do so at moderate cost resolve to test
on their own farms the advantages and benefits that may be secured by
Irrigation?
XIII.
THE POSSIBILITIES OF IRRIGATION.
I have given an account of my poor, little experiment in Irrigation,
because it is one which almost every farmer can imitate and improve
upon, however narrow his domain and slender his fortune. I presume there
are Half a Million homesteads in the United States which have natural
facilities for Irrigation at least equal to mine; many of them far
greater. Along either slope of the Alleghenies, throughout a district at
least a thousand miles long by three hundred wide, nearly every farm
might be at least partially irrigated by means of a dam costing from
twenty-five to one hundred dollars; so might at least half the farms in
New-England and our own State. On the prairies, the plans must be
different, and the expense probably greater, but the results obtained
would bounteously reward the outlay. I shall not see the day, but there
are those now living who _will_ see it, when Artesian wells will be dug
at points where many acres may be flowed from a gentle swell in the
midst of a vast plain, or at the head of a fertile valley, expressly, or
at least mainly, that its waters may be led across that plain, adown
that valley, in irrigating streams and ditches, until they have been
wholly drank up by the soil. I have seen single wells in California that
might be made to irrigate sufficiently hundreds of acres, by the aid of
a reservoir into which their waters could be discharged when the soil
did not require them, and there retained until the thirsty earth
demanded them.
An old and successful farmer in my neighborhood affirms that Water is
the cheapest and best fertilizer ever applied to the soil. If this were
understood to mean that no other is needed or can be profitably applied,
it would be erroneous. Still, I think it clearly true that the annual
product of most farms can be increased, and the danger of failure
averted, more cheaply by the skillful application of water than by that
of any other fertilizer whatever, Plaster (Gypsum) possibly excepted.
I took a run through Virginia last Summer, not far from the 1st of
August. That State was then suffering intensely from drouth, as she
continued to do for some weeks thereafter. I am quite sure that I saw on
her thirsty plains and hillsides not less than three hundred thousand
acres planted with Indian Corn, whereof the average product could not
exceed ten bushels per acre, while most of it would fall far below that
yield, and there were thousands of acres that would not produce one
sound ear! Every one deplored the failure, correctly attributing it to
the prevailing drouth. And yet, I passed hundreds if not thousands of
places where a very moderate outlay would have sufficed to dam a stream
or brooklet issuing from between two spurs of the Blue Ridge, or the
Alleghenies, so that a refreshing current of the copious and fertilizing
floods of Winter and Spring, warmed by the fervid suns of June and July,
could have been led over broad fields lying below, so as to vanquish
drouth and insure generous harvests. Nay; I feel confident that I could
in many places have constructed rude works in a week, after that drouth
began to be felt, that would have saved and made the Corn on at least a
portion of the planted acres through which the now shrunken brooks
danced and laughed idly down to the larger streams in the wider and
equally thirsty valleys. Of course, I know that this would have been
imperfect irrigation--a mere stop-gap--that the cold spring-water of a
parched Summer cannot fertilize as the hill-wash of Winter and Spring,
if thriftily garnered and warmed through and through for sultry weeks,
would do; yet I believe that very many farmers might, even then, have
secured partial crops by such irrigation as was still possible, had
they, even at the eleventh hour, done their best to retrieve the errors
of the past.
For the present, I would only counsel every farmer to give his land a
careful scrutiny with a view to irrigation in the future. No one is
obliged to do any faster than his means will justify; and yet it may be
well to have a clear comprehension of all that may ultimately be done to
profit, even though much of it must long remain unattempted. In many
cases, a stream may be dammed for the power which it will afford for two
or three months of each year, if it shall appear that this use is quite
consistent with its employment to irrigation, when the former alone
would not justify the requisite outlay. It is by thus making one expense
subserve two quite independent but not inconsistent purposes that
success is attained in other pursuits; and so it may be in farming.
As yet, each farmer must study his own resources with intent to make the
most of them. If a manageable stream crosses or issues from his land, he
must measure its fall thereon, study the lay of the land, and determine
whether he can or cannot, at a tolerable cost, make that stream
available in the irrigation of at least a portion of his growing crops
when they shall need water and the skies decline to supply it. On many,
I think on most, farms situated among hills, or upon the slopes of
mountains, something may be done in this way--done at once, and with
immediate profit. But this is rudimentary, partial, fragmentary, when
compared with the irrigation which yet shall be. I am confident that
there are points on the Carson, the Humboldt, the Weber, the South
Platte, the Cache-le-Poudre, and many less noted streams which thrid the
central plateau of our continent, where an expenditure of $10,000 to
$50,000 may be judiciously made in a dam, locks and canals, for the
purposes of irrigation and milling combined, with a moral certainty of
realizing fifty per cent. annually on the outlay, with a steady
increase in the value of the property. If my eye did not deceive me,
there is one point on the Carson where a dam that need not cost $50,000
would irrigate one hundred square miles of rich plain which, when I saw
it eleven years ago, grew nought but the worthless shrubs of the desert,
simply because nothing else could endure the intense, abiding drouth of
each Nevada Summer. Such palpable invitations to thrift cannot remain
forever unimproved.
In regions like this, where Summer rains are the rule rather than the
exception, the need of irrigation is not so palpable, since we do or may
secure decent average crops in its absence. Yet there is no farm in our
country that would not yield considerably more grain and more grass,
more fruit and more vegetables, if its owner had water at command which
he could apply at pleasure and to any extent he should deem requisite.
Most men, thus empowered, would at first irrigate too often and too
copiously; but experience would soon temper their zeal, and teach them
"The precious art of Not too much;"
and they would thenceforth be careful to give their soil drink yet, not
drown it.
* * * * *
Whoever lives beyond the close of this century, and shall then traverse
our prairie States, will see them whitened at intervals by the broad
sails of windmills erected over wells, whence every gale or breeze will
be employed in pumping water into the ponds or reservoirs so located
that water may be drawn therefrom at will and diffused in gentle
streamlets over the surrounding fields to invigorate and impel their
growing crops. And, when all has been done that this paper faintly
foreshadows, our people will have barely indicated, not by any means
exhausted, the beneficent possibilities of irrigation.
The difficulty is in making a beginning. Too many farmers would fain
conceal a poverty of thought behind an affectation of dislike or
contempt for novelties. "Humbug!" is their stereotyped comment on every
suggestion that they might wisely and profitably do something otherwise
than as their grandfathers did. They assume that those respected
ancestors did very well without Irrigation; wherefore, it cannot now be
essential. But the circumstances have materially changed. The
disappearance of the dense, high woods that formerly almost or quite
surrounded each farm has given a sweep to the heated, parching winds of
Summer, to which our ancestors were strangers. Our springs, our streams,
do not hold out as they once did. Our Summer drouths are longer and
fiercer. Even though our grandfathers did not, we _do_ need and may
profit by Irrigation.
XIV.
PLOWING--DEEP OR SHALLOW.
Rules absolutely without exception are rare; and they who imagine that I
insist on plowing all lands deeply are wrong for I hold that much land
should never be plowed at all. In fact, I have seen in my life nearly as
large an area that ought not as I have that ought to be plowed, by which
I mean that half the land I have seen may serve mankind better if
devoted to timber than if subjected to tillage. I personally know
farmers who would thrive far better if they tilled but half the area
they do, bestowing on this all the labor and fertilizers they spread
over the whole, even though they threw the residue into common and left
it there. I judge that a majority of our farmers could increase the
recompense of their toil by cultivating fewer acres than they now do.
Nor do I deny that there are soils which it is not advisable to plow
deeply. Prof. Mapes told me he had seen a tract in West Jersey whereof
the soil was but eight inches deep, resting on a stratum of copperas
(sulphate of iron,) which, being upturned by the plow and mingled with
the soil, poisoned the crops planted thereon. And I saw, last Summer,
on the intervale of New River, in the western part of Old Virginia, many
acres of Corn which were thrifty and luxuriant in spite of shallow
plowing and intense drouth, because the rich, black loam which had there
been deposited by semi-annual inundations, until its depth ranged from
two to twenty feet, was so inviting and permeable that the corn-roots
ran _below_ the bottom of the furrow about as readily as above that
line. I do not doubt that there are many millions of acres of such land
that would produce tolerably, and sometimes bounteously, though simply
scratched over by a brush harrow and never plowed at all. In the infancy
of our race, when there were few mouths to fill and when farming
implements were very rude and ineffective, cultivation was all but
confined to these facile strips and patches, so that the utility, the
need, of deep tillage was not apparent. And yet, we know the crops often
failed utterly in those days, plunging whole nations into the miseries
of famine.
The primitive plow was a forked stick or tree-top, whereof one prong
formed the coulter, the other and longer the beam; and he who first
sharpened the coulter-prong with a stone hatchet was the Whitney or
McCormick of his day. The plow in common use to-day in Spain or Turkey
is an improvement on this, for it has an iron point; still, it is a
miserable tool. When, at five years old, I first rode the horse which
drew my father's plow in furrowing for or cultivating his corn, it had
an iron coulter and an iron share; but it was mainly composed of wood.
In the hard, rocky soil of New-Hampshire, as full of bowlders and
pebbles as a Christmas pudding is of plums, plowing with such an
implement was a sorry business at best. My father hitched eight oxen and
a horse to his plow when he broke up pebbly green-sward, and found an
acre of it a very long day's work. I hardly need add that subsoiling was
out of the question, and that six inches was the average depth of his
furrow.
I judge that the best Steel Plows now in use do twice the execution that
his did with a like expenditure of power--that we can, with equal power,
plow twelve inches as easily and rapidly as he plowed six. Ought we to
do it? Will it pay?
I first farmed for myself in 1845 on a plat of eight acres, in what was
then the open country skirting the East River nearly abreast the lower
point of Blackwell's Island, near Fiftieth-st., on a little indentation
of the shore known as Turtle Bay. None of the Avenues east of Third was
then opened above Thirtieth-st.; and the neighborhood, though now
perforated by streets and covered with houses, was as rural and secluded
as heart could wish. One fine Spring morning, a neighbor called and
offered to plow for $5 my acre of tillage not cut up by rows of box and
other shrubs; and I told him to go ahead. I came home next evening, just
as he was finishing the job, which I contemplated most ruefully. His
plow was a pocket edition; his team a single horse; his furrows at most
five inches deep. I paid him, but told him plainly that I would have
preferred to give the money for nothing. He insisted that he had plowed
for me as he plowed for others all around me. "I will tell you," I
rejoined, "exactly how this will work. Throughout the Spring and early
Summer, we shall have frequent rains and moderate heat: thus far, my
crops will do well. But then will come hot weeks, with little or no
rain; and they will dry up this shallow soil and every thing planted
thereon."
The result signally justified my prediction. We had frequent rains and
cloudy, mild weather, till the 1st of July, when the clouds vanished,
the sun came out intensely hot, and we had scarcely a sprinkle till the
1st of September, by which time my Corn and Potatoes had about given up
the ghost. Like the seed which fell on stony ground in the Parable of
the Sower, that which I had planted had withered away "because there was
no root;" and my prospect for a harvest was utterly blighted, where,
with twelve inches of loose, fertile, well pulverized earth at their
roots, my crops would have been at least respectable. When I became once
more a farmer in a small way on my present place, I had not forgotten
the lesson, and I tried to have plowed deeply and thoroughly so much
land as I had plowed at all. My first Summer here (1853) was a very dry
one, and crops failed in consequence around me and all over the country;
yet mine were at least fair; and I was largely indebted for them to
relatively deep plowing. I have since suffered from frost (on my low
land), from the rotting of seed in the ground, from the ravages of
insects, etc.; but never by drouth; and I am entirely confident that
Deep Plowing has done me excellent service. My only trouble has been to
get it done; for there are apt to be reasons?--(haste, lateness in the
season, etc.)--for plowing shallowly for "just this time," with full
intent to do henceforth better.
* * * * *
I close this paper with a statement made to me by an intelligent British
farmer living at Maidstone, south of England. He said:
"A few years ago there came into my hands a field of twelve acres, which
had been an orchard; but the trees were hopelessly in their dotage. They
must be cut down; then their roots must be grubbed out; so I resolved to
make a clean job of it, and give the field a thorough trenching.
Choosing a time in Autumn or early Winter when labor was abundant and
cheap, I had it turned over three spits (27 inches) deep; the lowest
being merely reversed; the next reversed and placed at the top; the
surface being reversed and placed below the second. The soil was strong
and deep, as that of an orchard should be; I planted the field to Garden
Peas, and my first picking was very abundant. About the time that peas
usually begin to wither and die, the roots of mine struck the rich soil
which had been the first stratum, but was now the second, and at once
the stalks evinced a new life--threw out new blossoms, which were
followed by pods; and so kept on blossoming and forming peas for weeks,
until this first crop far more than paid the cost of trenching and
cultivation."
Thus far my English friend. Who will this year try a patch of Peas on a
plat made rich and mellow for a depth of at least two feet, and
frequently moistened in Summer by some rude kind of irrigation?
The fierceness of our Summer suns, when not counteracted by frequent
showers, shortens deplorably the productiveness of many Vegetables and
Berries. Our Strawberries bear well, but too briefly; our Peas wither up
and cease to blossom after they have been two or three weeks plump
enough to pick. Our Raspberries, Blackberries, etc., fruit well, but are
out of bearing too soon after they begin to yield their treasures. I am
confident that this need not be. With a deep, rich soil, kept moistened
by a periodical flow of water, there need not and should not be any such
haste to give over blooming and bearing. The fruit is Nature's
attestation of the geniality of the season, the richness and abundance
of the elements inhering in the soil or supplied to it by the water.
Double the supply of these, and sterility should be postponed to a far
later day than that in which it is now inaugurated.
XV.
PLOWING--GOOD AND BAD.
There are so many wrong ways to do a thing to but one right one that
there is no reason in the impatience too often evinced with those who
contrive to swallow the truth wrong end foremost, and thereupon insist
that it won't do. For instance: A farmer hears something said of deep
plowing, and, without any clear understanding of or firm faith in it,
resolves to give it a trial. So he buys a great plow, makes up a strong
team, and proceeds to turn up a field hitherto plowed but six inches to
a depth of a foot: in other words, to bury its soil under six inches of
cold, sterile clay, sand, or gravel. On this, he plants or sows grain,
and is lucky indeed if he realizes half a crop. Hereupon, he reports to
his neighbors that Deep Plowing is a humbug, as he suspected all along;
but now he knows, for he has tried it. There are several other wrong
ways, which I will hurry over, in order to set forth that which I regard
as the right one.
Here is a middling farmer of the old school, who walks carefully in the
footsteps of his respected grandfather, but with inferior success,
because sixty annual harvests, though not particularly luxuriant, have
partially exhausted the productive capacity of the acres he inherited.
He now garners from fifteen to thirty bushels per acre of Corn, from ten
to twenty of Wheat, from fifteen to twenty of Rye, from twenty to thirty
of Oats, and from a tun to a tun and a half of Hay, as the season proves
more or less propitious, and just contrives to draw from his sixty to
one hundred acres a decent subsistence for his family; plowing, as his
father and grandfather did, to a depth of five to seven inches: What can
Deep Plowing do for _him_?
I answer--By itself, nothing whatever. If in every other respect he is
to persist in doing just as his father and his grandfather did, I doubt
the expediency of doubling the depth of his furrows. True, the worst
effects of the change would be realized at the outset, and I feel
confident that his six inches of subsoil, having been made to change
places with that which formerly rested upon it, must gradually be
wrought upon by air, and rain, and frost, until converted into a
tolerably productive soil, through which the roots of most plants would
easily and speedily make their way down to the richer stratum which,
originally surface, has been transposed into subsoil. But this exchange
of positions between the original surface and subsoil is not what I mean
by Deep Plowing, nor anything like it. What I _do_ mean is this:
Having thoroughly underdrained a field, so that water will not stand
upon any part of its surface, no matter how much may there be deposited,
the next step in order is to increase the depth of the soil. To this
end, procure a regular sub-soil plow of the most approved pattern,
attach to it a strong team, and let it follow the breaking-plow in its
furrow, lifting and pulverizing the sub-soil to a depth of not less than
six inches, but leaving it in position exactly where it was. The
surface-plow turns the next furrow upon this loosened sub-soil, and so
on till the whole field is thus pulverized to a depth of not less than
twelve inches, or, better still, fifteen. Now, please remember that you
have twice as much soil per acre to fertilize as there was before;
hence, that it consequently requires twice as much manure, and you will
have laid a good foundation for increased crops. I do not say that all
the additional outlay will be returned to you in the increase of your
next crop, for I do not believe anything of the sort; but I _do_ believe
that this crop will be considerably larger for this generous treatment,
especially if the season prove remarkably dry or uncommonly wet; and
that you will have insured better crops in the years to come, including
heavier grass, after that field shall once more be laid down; and that,
in case of the planting of that field to fruit or other trees, they will
grow faster, resist disease better, and thrive longer, than if the soil
were still plowed as of old. (I shall insist hereafter on the advantage
and importance of subsoiling orchards.)
Take another aspect--that of subsoiling hill-sides to prevent their
abrasion by water:
I have two bits of warm, gravelly hill-side, which bountifully yield
Corn, Wheat and Oats, but which are addicted to washing. I presume one
of these bits, at the south-east corner of my farm, has been plowed and
planted not less than one hundred times, and that at least half the
fertilizers applied to it have been washed into the brook, and hence
into the Hudson. To say that $1,000 have thus been squandered on that
patch of ground, would be to keep far within the truth. And, along with
the fertilizers, a large portion of the finer and better elements of the
original soil have thus been swept into the brook, and so lavished upon
the waters of our bay. But, since I had those lots thoroughly subsoiled,
all the water that falls upon them when in tillage sinks into the soil,
and remains there until drained away by filtration or evaporation; and I
never saw a particle of soil washed from either save once, when a thaw
of one or two inches on the surface, leaving the ground solidly frozen
beneath, being quickly followed by a pouring rain, washed away a few
bushels of the loosened and sodden surface, proving that the law by
virtue of which these fields were formerly denuded while in cultivation
is still active, and that Deep Plowing is an effective and all but
unfailing antidote for the evil it tends to incite.
We plow too many acres annually, and do not plow them so thoroughly as
we ought. In the good time coming, when Steam shall have been so
harnessed to a gang of six to twelve plows that, with one man guiding
and firing, it will move as fast as a man ought to walk, steaming on and
thoroughly pulverizing from twelve to twenty-five acres per day, I
believe we shall plow at least two feet deep, and plow not less than
twice before putting in any crop whatever. Then we may lay down a field
in the confident trust that it will yield from two and a half to three
tuns of good hay per annum for the next ten or twelve years; while, by
the help of irrigation and occasional top-dressing, it may be made to
average at least three tuns for a life-time, if not forever.
When my Grass-land requires breaking up--as it sometimes does--I
understand that it was not properly laid down, or has not been well
treated since. A good grazing farmer once insisted in my hearing that
grass-land should _never_ be plowed--that the vegetable mold forming the
surface, when the timber was first cut off; should remain on the surface
forever. Considering how uneven the stumps and roots and cradle-knolls
of a primitive forest are apt to leave the ground, I judge that this is
an extreme statement. But land once thoroughly plowed and subsoiled
ought thereafter to be kept in grass by liberal applications of Gypsum,
well-cured Muck, and barn-yard Manure to its surface, without needing to
be plowed again and reseeded. Put back in Manure what is taken of in
Hay, and the Grass should hold its own.
XVI.
THOROUGH TILLAGE.
My little, hilly, rocky farm teaches lessons of thoroughness which I
would gladly impart to the boys of to-day who are destined to be the
farmers of the last quarter of this century. I am sure they will find
profit in farming better than their grandfathers did, and especially in
putting their land into the best possible condition for effective
tillage. There were stones in my fields varying in size from that of a
brass kettle up to that of a hay-cock--some of them raising their heads
above the surface, others burrowing just below it--which had been plowed
around and over perhaps a hundred times, till I went at them with team
and bar, or (where necessary) with drill and blast, turned or blew them
out, and hauled them away, so that they will interfere with cultivation
nevermore. I insist that this is a profitable operation--that a field
which will not pay for such clearing should be planted with trees and
thrown out of cultivation conclusively. Dodging and skulking from rock
to rock is hard upon team, plow, and plowman; and it can rarely pay.
Land ribbed and spotted with fast rocks will pay if judiciously planted
with Timber--possibly if well set in Fruit--but tilling it from year to
year is a thankless task; and its owner may better work by the day for
his neighbors than try to make his bread by such tillage.
So with fields soaked by springs or sodden with stagnant water. If you
say you cannot afford to drain your wet land, I respond that you can
still less afford to till it without draining. If you really cannot
afford to fit it for cultivation, your next best course is to let it
severely alone.
A poor man who has a rough, rugged, sterile farm, which he is unable to
bring to its best possible condition at once, yet which he clings to and
must live from, should resolve that, if life and health be spared him,
he will reclaim one field each year until all that is not devoted to
timber shall have been brought into high condition. When his Summer
harvest is over, and his Fall crops have received their last
cultivation, there will generally be from one to two Autumn months which
he can devote mainly to this work. Let him take hold of it with resolute
purpose to improve every available hour, not by running over the largest
possible area, but by dealing with one field so thoroughly that it will
need no more during a long life-time. If it has stone that the plow will
reach, dig them out; if it needs draining, drain it so thoroughly that
it may hereafter be plowed in Spring so soon as the frost leaves it; and
now let soil and subsoil be so loosened and pulverized that roots may
freely penetrate them to a depth of fifteen to twenty inches, finding
nourishment all the way, with incitement to go further if ever failing
moisture shall render this necessary. Drouth habitually shortens our
Fall crops from ten to fifty per cent.; it is sure to injure us more
gravely as our forests are swept away by ax and fire; and, while much
may be done to mitigate its ravages by enriching the soil so as to give
your crops an early start, and a rank, luxuriant growth, the farmer's
chief reliance must still be a depth of soil adequate to withstand weeks
of the fiercest sunshine.
I have considered what is urged as to the choice of roots to run just
beneath the surface, and it does not signify. Roots seek at once heat
and moisture; if the moisture awaits them close to the surface, of
course they mainly run there, because the heat is there greatest. If
moisture fails there, they must descend to seek it, even at the cost of
finding the heat inadequate--though heat increases and descends under
the fervid suns which rob the surface of moisture. Make the soil rich
and mellow ever so far down, and you need not fear that the roots will
descend an inch lower than they should. _They_ understand their
business; it is _your_ sagacity that may possibly prove deficient.
I suspect that the average farmer does far too little plowing--by which
I mean, not that he plows too few acres, for he often plows too many,
but that he should plow oftener as well as deeper and more thoroughly.
I spent three or four of my boyish Summers planting and tilling Corn and
Potatoes on fields broken up just before they were planted, never
cross-plowed, and of course tough and intractable throughout the season.
The yield of Corn was middling, considering the season; that of Potatoes
more than middling; yet, if those fields had been well plowed in the
previous Autumn, cross-plowed early in the Spring; and thoroughly
harrowed just before planting-time, I am confident that the yield would
have been far greater, and the labor (save in harvesting) rather
less--the cost of the Fall plowing being over-balanced by the saving of
half the time necessarily given to the planting and hoeing.
Fall Plowing has this recommendation--it lightens labor at the busier
season, by transferring it to one of comparative dullness. I may have
said that I consider him a good farmer who knows how to make a rainy day
equally effective with one that is dry and fair; and, in the same
spirit, I count him my master in this art who can make a day's work in
Autumn or Winter save a day's work in Spring or Summer. Show me a farmer
who has no land plowed when May opens, and is just waking up to a
consciousness that his fences need mending and his trees want trimming,
and I will guess that the sheriff will be after him before May comes
round again.
* * * * *
There is no superstition in the belief that land is (or may be) enriched
by Fall Plowing. The Autumn gales are freighted with the more volatile
elements of decaying vegetation. These, taken up wherever they are given
of in excess, are wafted to and deposited in the soils best fitted for
their reception. Regarded simply as a method of fertilizing, I do not
say that Fall Plowing is the cheapest; I _do_ say that any poor field,
if well plowed in the Fall, will be in better heart the next Spring, for
what wind and rain will meantime have deposited thereon. Frost, too, in
any region where the ground freezes, and especially where it freezes and
thaws repeatedly, plays an important and beneficial part in aerating and
pulverizing a freshly plowed soil, especially one thrown up into ridges,
so as to be most thoroughly exposed to the action of the more volatile
elements. The farmer who has a good team may profitably keep the plow
running in Autumn until every rood that he means to till next season has
been thoroughly pulverized.
In this section, our minute chequer-work of fences operates to obstruct
and impede Plowing. Our predecessors wished to clear their fields, at
least superficially, of the loose, troublesome bowlders of granite
wherewith they were so thickly sown; they mistakenly fancied that they
could lighten their own toil by sending their cattle to graze, browse,
and gnaw, wherever a crop was not actually on the ground; so they fenced
their farms into patches of two or ten acres, and thought they had
thereby increased their value! That was a sad miscalculation. Weeds,
briars and bushes were sheltered, and nourished by these walls;
weasels, rats and other destructive animals, found protection and
impunity therein; a wide belt on either side was made useless or worse;
while Plowing was rendered laborious, difficult, and inefficient, by the
necessity of turning after every few hundred steps. We are growing
slowly wiser, and burying a part of these walls, or building them into
concrete barns or other useful structures; but they are still far too
plentiful, and need to be dealt with more sternly. O squatter on a wide
prairie, on the bleak Plains, or in a broad Pacific valley, where wood
must be hauled for miles and loose stone are rarely visible, thank God
for the benignant dispensation which has precluded you from half
spoiling your farm by a multiplicity of obstructing, deforming, fences,
and so left its soil free and open to be everywhere pervaded, loosened,
permeated, by the renovating Plow!
XVII.
COMMERCIAL FERTILIZERS--GYPSUM.
Prices vary so widely in different localities that no fertilizer can be
pronounced everywhere cheapest or best worth buying; and yet I doubt
that there is a rood of our country's surface in fit condition to be
cultivated to which Gypsum (Plaster of Paris) might not be applied with
profit. Where it costs $10 or over per tun, I would apply it
sparingly--say, one bushel per acre--while I judge three bushels per
acre none too much in regions where it may be bought much cheaper. Even
the poor man who has but one cow, should buy a barrel of it, and dust
his stable therewith after cleaning it each day. He who has a stock of
cattle should never be without it, and should freely use it, alike in
stable and yard, to keep down the noisome odors, and thus retain the
volatile elements of the manure. Every meadow, every pasture, should be
sown with it at least triennially; where it is abundant and cheap, as in
Central New-York, I would apply it each year, unless careful observation
should satisfy me that it no longer subserved a good purpose.
As to the _time_ of application, while I judge any season will do, my
present impression is that it will do most good if applied when the
Summer is hottest and the ground driest. If, for instance, you close
your haying in mid-Summer, having been hurried by the rapid ripening of
the grass, and find your meadows baked and cracked by the intense heat,
I reckon that you may proceed to dust those meadows with Gypsum with a
moral certainty that none of it will be wasted. So if your Corn and
other Fall crops are suffering from and likely to be stunted by drouth,
I advise the application of Gypsum broadcast, as evenly as may be and as
bounteously as its price and your means will allow. I do not believe it
so well to apply it specially to the growing stalks, a spoon-full or so
per hill; and I doubt that it is ever judicious to plant it _in_ the
hill with the seed. The readiest and quickest mode of application is
also, I believe, the best.
_How_ Gypsum impels and invigorates vegetable growth, I do not pretend
to know; but that it _does_ so was demonstrated by Nature long before
Man took the hint that she freely gave. The city of Paris and a
considerable adjacent district rest on a bed of Gypsum, ranging from
five to twenty feet below the surface, and considerably decomposed in
its upper portion by the action of water. This region produces Wheat
most luxuriantly, and I presume has done so from time immemorial. At
length it crawled through the hair of the tillers of this soil that the
substance which did so much good fortuitously, and (as it were) because
it could not do otherwise, might do still more if applied to the soil,
with deliberate intent to test its value as a fertilizer. The result we
all understand.
Gypsum is a chemical compound of Sulphur and Lime--so much is agreed;
and the theory of chemists has been that; as the winds pass over a
surface sown with it, the Ammonia which has been exhaled by a thousand
barn-yards, bogs, &c., having a stronger affinity for Sulphur than Lime
has, dissolves the Gypsum, combines with the Sulphur, forming a Sulphate
of Ammonia, and leaves the Lime to get on as it may. I accept this
theory, having no reason to distrust it; and, knowing that Sulphate of
Ammonia is a powerful stimulant of vegetable growth (as any one may be
assured by buying a little of it from some druggist and making the
necessary application), I can readily see how the desired result _might_
in this way be produced. For our purpose, however, let it suffice that
_it is_ produced, of which almost any one may be convinced by sowing
with Gypsum and passing by alternate strips or belts of the same clover
field. I suspect that not many fertilizers repay their cost out of the
first crop; but I account Gypsum one of them; and I submit that no
farmer can afford not to try it. That its good effect is diminished by
many and frequent applications, is highly probable; but there is no hill
or slope to which Gypsum has never yet been applied which ought not to
make its acquaintance this very year. I am confident that there are
pastures which might be made to increase their yield of Grass one-third
by a moderate dressing of it.
I have heard Andrew B. Dickinson, late of Steuben County, and one of the
best unscientific, unlearned farmers ever produced by our State,
maintain that he can not only enrich his own farm but impoverish his
neighbors' by the free use of Gypsum on his woodless hills. The
chemist's explanation of this effect is above indicated. The plastered
land attracts and absorbs not only its own fair proportion of the
breeze-borne Ammonia, but much that, if the equilibrium had not been
disturbed by such application, would have been deposited on the adjacent
hills. As Mr. D. makes not the smallest pretensions to science, the
coincidence between his dictum and the chemist's theory is noteworthy.
Now that our country is completely gridironed with Canals and Railroads,
bringing whatever has a mercantile value very near every one's door, I
suggest that no township should go without Gypsum. Five dollars will buy
at least two barrels of it almost anywhere; and two barrels may be sown
over five or six acres. Let it be sown so that its effect (or
non-effect) may be palpable; give it a fair, careful trial, and await
the result. If it seem to subserve no good purpose, be not too swift to
enter up judgment; but buy two barrels more, vary your time and method
of application, and try again. If the result be still null, let it be
given up that Gypsum is not the fertilizer needed just there--that some
ill-understood peculiarity of soil or climate renders it there
ineffective. Then let its use be there abandoned; but it will still
remain true that, in many localities and in countless instances, Gypsum
has been fully proved one of the best and cheapest commercial
fertilizers known to mankind.
I never tried, but on the strength of others' testimony believe in the
improvement of soils by means of calcined clay or earth. Mr. Andrew B.
Dickinson showed me where he had, during a dry Autumn plowed up the
road-sides through his farm, started fires with a few roots or sticks,
and then piled on sods of the upturned clay and grass-roots till the
fire was nearly smothered, when each heap smoked and smouldered like a
little coal-pit till all of it that was combustible was reduced to
ashes, when ashes and burned clay were shoveled into a cart and strewn
over his fields, to the decided improvement of their crops. Whoever has
a clay sod to plow up, and is deficient in manure, may repeat this
experiment with a moral certainty of liberal returns.
XVIII.
ALKALIS ... SALT--ASHES--LIME.
I do not know a rood of our country's surface so rich in _all_ the
materials which enter into the production of the Grains, Grasses,
Fruits, and Vegetables, which are the objects and rewards of
cultivation, that it could not be improved by the application of
fertilizers; if there be such, I heartily congratulate the owners, and
advise them not to sell. Nor do I believe that there are many acres so
fertile that they would not produce more Indian Corn, more Hemp, more
Cotton, and more of whatever may be their appropriate staple, if
judiciously fertilized. If there be farms or fields originally so good
that manure would not increase their yield, I am confident that the
first half-dozen crops will have taken that conceit out of them.
Prairies and river-bottoms may yield ever so bounteously; but that very
luxuriance of growth insures their gradual exhaustion of certain
elements of crops, which must needs be replaced or their product will
dwindle. Whoever has sold a thousand bushels of grain, or its equivalent
in meat, from his farm, has thereby impoverished that farm, unless he
has applied something that balances its loss. "I perceive that virtue
has gone out of me," observed the Saviour, because the hem of his
garment had been touched; and every field that had been cropped might
make a similar report whenever its annual loss by abstraction has not
been balanced by some kind of fertilizer. The farmer who grows the
largest crops is the most merciless exhauster of the soil, unless he
balances his annual drafts (as good farmers rarely fail to do) by at
least equal reenforcements of the productive capacity of his fields.
The good farmer begins by inquiring, "Wherein was my soil originally
deficient? and of what has it been exhausted by subsequent crops?" I
judge that my gravelly hill-sides would reward the application of two
hundred loads (or tuns) of pure clay per acre, as I think the clay flats
which border Lake Champlain would pay for a like application of sand or
fine gravel where that material is found in convenient proximity; and
yet, I know very well that, on at least three-fourths of our country's
area, such application would cost far more than it would be worth. Every
farmer must act on his knowledge of his soil and its peculiar needs, and
not blindly follow the dictum of another. Yet I know few farms which,
were they mine, I would not consider enhanced in value by a vigorous
application of _some_ alkaline substance--Lime, Salt, Ashes, or some of
the cheaper Nitrates. I should be very glad to apply one thousand
bushels of good house-made, hard-wood Ashes to my twenty acres of
arable upland, if I could buy them, delivered, at twenty five cents per
bushel; but they are not to be had. I doubt that there are a hundred
acres of warm, dry, gravelly or sandy soil east of the Alleghanies that
would not amply reward a similar application. But Ashes in quantity are
unattainable, since no good farmer sells them, and Coal is the chief
fuel of cities and villages. The Marls of New-Jersey I judge fully equal
in average value to Ashes which have been nearly deprived of their
potash by leaching, but not quite half equal, bushel for bushel, to
_un_leached Ashes. I judge that average Marl is worth 10 cents per
bushel where Ashes may be had for 25. But Marl is found only in a few
localities, and a material worth but 10 cents per bushel will not bear
transportation beyond 40 miles by wagon or 200 by water. Salt is only
found or made at a few points, and is too dear for general use as a
fertilizer. Where the refuse product of Salt-Works can be cheaply
bought, good farmers will eagerly compete for it, if their lands at all
resemble mine. I judge the tun of Potash I ordered fifteen years ago
from Syracuse, paying $50 and transportation, was the cheapest
fertilizer I ever bought. It was so impregnated with Salt (from the
boiling over of the salt-kettles into the ashes) as to be worthless for
other than agricultural purposes; but I mixed it with a large pile of
Muck that I had recently dug, and, six or eight months thereafter,
applied the product to a very poor, gravelly hill-side which I had just
broken up; and the immediate result was a noble crop of Corn. That
hill-side has not yet forgotten the application.
--If I should try to explain just how and why Lime is a fertilizer, I
should probably fail; and I am well assured that liming has in some
cases been overdone; yet I think most observers will concur in my
statement that _any region which has been limed year after year produces
crops of noticeable excellence_. I cite as examples Chester and
Lancaster Counties, Pennsylvania, with Stark and adjacent counties of
Ohio. Possibly, results equally gratifying might be secured by applying
some other substance; I only _know_ that frequently limed lands are
generally good lands, as their crops do testify. I heartily wish that
the flat clay intervales of Western Vermont could have a fair trial of
the virtues of liming. I should expect to see them thereby rendered
friable and arable; no longer changing speedily from the semblance of
tar to that of brick, but readily plowed and tilled, and yielding
liberally of Grain as well as Grass. I am confident that most farms in
our country will pay for liming to the extent of fifty bushels per acre
where the cost of quick-lime does not exceed ten cents per bushel; and
most farmers, by taking, hot from the kiln, the refuse lime that is
deemed unfit for building purposes, can obtain it cheaper than that.
I wish some farmer who gives constant personal attention to his work--as
I cannot--would make some careful tests of the practical value of
alkalis. For instance: the abundance and tenacity of our common sorrel
is supposed to indicate an acid condition of the soil; and all who have
tried it know that sorrel is hard to kill by cultivation. I suggest that
whoever is troubled with it should cover two square rods with one bushel
of quick-lime just after plowing and harrowing this Spring; then apply
another bushel to _four_ square rods adjacent; then make similar
applications of ashes to two and four square rods respectively, taking
careful note of the boundaries of each patch, and leaving the rest of
the field destitute of either application. I will not anticipate the
result: more than one year may be required to evolve it; but I am
confident that a few such experiments would supply data whereof I am in
need; and there are doubtless others whose ignorance is nearly equal to
mine.
Many have applied Lime to their fields without realizing any advantage
therefrom. In some cases, there was already a sufficiency of this
ingredient in the soil, and the application of more was one of those
many wasteful blunders induced by our ignorance of Chemistry. But much
Lime is naturally adulterated with other minerals, especially with
Manganese, so that its application to most if not to all soils subserves
no good end. In the absence of exact, scientific knowledge, I would buy
fifty bushels of quick-lime, apply them to one acre running through a
field, and watch the effect. If it doesn't pay, you have a bad article,
or your soil is not deficient in Lime.
XIX.
SOILS AND FERTILIZERS.
A farmer is a manufacturer of articles wherefrom mankind are fed and
clad; his raw materials are the soil and the various substances he
mingles therewith or adds thereto in order to increase its productive
capacity. His art consists in transforming by cultivation crude,
comparatively worthless, and even noxious, offensive materials into
substances grateful to the senses, nourishing to the body, and sometimes
invigorating, even strengthening, to the mind.
I have heard of lands that were naturally rich enough; I never was so
lucky or perchance so discerning as to find them. Yet I have seen
Illinois bottoms whereof I was assured that the soil was fully sixteen
feet deep, and a rich, black alluvium from top to bottom; and I do not
question the statements made to me from personal observation that
portions of the strongly alkaline plain or swale on which Salt Lake City
is built, being for the first time plowed, irrigated, and sown to Wheat,
yielded ninety bushels of good grain per acre. I never saw, yet on
evidence believe, that pioneer settlers of the Miami Valley, wishing,
some years after settling there, to sell their farms, advertised them as
peculiarly desirable in that the barns stood over a creek or "branch,"
which swept away the manure each Winter or Spring without trouble to the
owner; and I have myself grown both Wheat and Oats that were very rank
and heavy in straw, yet which fell so flat and lay so dead that the
heads scarcely bore a kernel. Had I been a wiser, better farmer, I
should have known how to stiffen the straw and make it do its office, in
spite of wind and storm.
[And let me here say, lest I forget it in its appropriate place, that I
am confident that most farmers sow grain too thickly for any but very
poor land. If one thinks it necessary to scatter three bushels of Oats
per acre, I tell him that he should apply more manure and less
seed--that land which requires three bushels of seed is not rich enough
to bear Oats. He might better concentrate his manure on half so much
land, and save two-thirds of his seed.]
I do not hold that the remarkably rich soils I have instanced needed
fertilizing when first plowed; I will presume that they did not. Yet,
having never yet succeeded in manuring a corn-field so high that a few
loads more would not (I judge) have increased the crop, I doubt whether
even the richest Illinois bottoms would not yield more Corn, year by
year, if reenforced with the contents of a good barn-yard. And, when the
first heavy crop of Corn has been taken from a field, that field--no
matter how deep and fertile its soil--is less rich in corn-forming
elements than it was before. Just so sure as that there is no depletion
or shrinkage when nothing is taken from nothing, so sure is it that
something cannot be taken from something without diminishing its
capacity to yield something at the next call. Rotation of crops is an
excellent plan; for one may flourish on that which another has rejected;
but this does not overbear Nature's inflexible exaction of so much for
so much. Hence, if there ever was a field so rich that nothing could be
added that would increase its productive capacity, the first exacting
crop thereafter taken from it diminished that capacity, and rendered a
fresh application of some fertilizer desirable.
Years ago, a Western man exhibited at our Farmers' Club a specimen of
the soil of his region which was justly deemed very rich, taken from a
field whereon Corn had been repeatedly grown without apparent
exhaustion. A chemical analysis had been made of it, which was submitted
with the soil. It was claimed that nothing could improve its capacity
for producing the great Illinois staple. Prof. Mapes dissented from this
conclusion. "This soil," said he, "while very rich in nearly every
element which enters into the composition of Corn, gives barely a trace
of Chlorine, the base of Salt. Hence, if five bushels per acre of Salt
be applied to that field, and it does not thereupon yield five bushels
more per annum of Corn, I will agree to eat the field."
Many men fertilize their poor lands only, supposing that the better can
do without. I judge that to be a mistake. My rule would be to plant the
poorest with such choice trees as thrive without manure, and pile the
fertilizers upon the better. It seems to me plain that of two fields,
one of which has a soil containing nine-tenths of the elements of the
desired crop, while the other shows but one to three-tenths, it is a
more hopeful and less thankless task to enrich the former than the
latter. If you are required to supply to a field nearly everything that
your proposed crop will withdraw from it, I do not see where the profit
comes in; but if you are required to supply but a tenth, because the
soil as you found it stood ready to contribute the remaining
nine-tenths, it seems to me that the margin for profit is here decidedly
the greater.
How many tuns of earth ought a farmer to be obliged to turn over and
over in order to obtain therefrom a hundred bushels of Corn? Two
hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? _Five_ thousand? Other things being
equal, no one will doubt that, if he can make the Corn from one hundred
tuns of soil, it were better to do so than to employ five hundred or
five thousand. It seems clear to my mind that, though other conditions
be unequal, it is generally well to endeavor to produce the required
quantity from the smaller rather than the larger area.
I fully share the average farmer's partiality for barn-yard manure in
preference to most, if not all, commercial fertilizers. In my judgment,
almost any farmer who has cattle, with fit shelter and Winter fodder,
can make fertilizers far cheaper than he can buy them. I judge that
almost every farmer who has paid $100 or over for Guano (for instance),
might have more considerably enriched his farm by drawing muck from some
convenient bog or pond into his barn-yard in August or September and
carting it thence to his fields the next Fall. If he can get no muck
within a mile, let him cut, when they are in blossom, all the weeds that
grow near him, especially by the road-side, cart them at once into his
barn-yard, and there convert them into fertilizers. In Autumn, replace
the hay-rack on the wagon or cart, and pile load after load of
freshly-fallen leaves into your yard; taking them, if you may, from the
sides of roads and fences, and from any place where they may have been
lodged or heaped by the winds, your own wood-lot excepted. Plow the turf
off of any scurvy lot or road-side, and pile it into the barn-yard; nay,
dig a hundred loads of pure clay, and place it there, if you can get it
at a small expense, and your average soil is gravelly or sandy. The
farmer who is unable or reluctant to buy commercial fertilizers should
apply his whole force every Autumn to replenishing his barn-yard with
that material which he can obtain most easily which the trampling of his
cattle may readily convert into manure. A month is too little, two
months would not be too much, to devote to this good work. Some may seem
obliged to postpone it to Winter; but that is to run the risk of
embarrassment by frost or snow, and encounter the certainty that your
material will be inferior in quality, or not so well fitted to apply to
grain-crops the ensuing Fall.
--All this, you may say, is not instruction. We ought to know exactly
what lands are enriched by Gypsum, and what, if any, are not; why these
are fertilized, why those are not, by a common application; how great is
the profit of such application in any case; and what substitute can most
nearly subserve the same ends where Gypsum is not to be had. I admit all
you claim, and do not doubt that there shall yet be a Scientific
Agriculture that will fully answer your requirements. As yet, however,
it exists but in suggestions and fragments; and attempts to complete it
by naked assertions and sweeping generalizations tend rather to mislead
and disgust the young farmer than really to enlighten and guide him. At
all events, I shall aim to set forth as true no more than I know, or
with good reason confidently believe.
I close by reiterating my belief that no farmer ever yet impoverished
himself by making too much manure or by applying too much of his own
manufacture. I cannot speak so confidently of _buying_ commercial
fertilizers; but these I will discuss in my next chapter.
XX.
BONES--PHOSPHATES--GUANO.
I hate to check improvement or chill the glow of Faith; yet I do so
keenly apprehend that many of our people, especially among the Southern
cotton-growers, are squandering money on Commercial Fertilizers, that I
am bound to utter my note of warning, even though it should pass wholly
unheeded. Let me make my position as clear as I can.
I live in a section which has been cultivated for more than two
centuries, while its proximity to a great city has tempted to crop it
incessantly, exhaustively. Wheat while its original surface soil of six
to twelve inches of vegetable mold (mainly composed of decayed
forest-leaves) remained; then Corn and Oats; at length, Milk, Beef, and
Apples--have exhausted the hill-sides and gentler slopes of Westchester
County, except where they have been kept in heart by judicious culture
and liberal fertilizing; and, even here, that subtle element,
Phosphorus, which enters minutely but necessarily into the composition
of every animal and nearly every vegetable structure has been gradually
drawn away in Grain, in Milk, in Bones, and not restored to the soil by
the application of ordinary manures. I am convinced that a field may be
so manured as to give three tuns of Hay per acre, yet so destitute of
Phosphorus that a sound, healthy animal cannot be grown therefrom. For
two centuries, the tillers of Westchester County knew nothing of
Chemistry or Phosphorus, and allowed the unvalued bones of their animals
to be exported to fatten British meadows, without an effort to retain
them. Hence, it has become absolutely essential that we buy and apply
Phosphates, even though the price be high; for our land can no longer do
without them. Wherever a steer or heifer can occasionally be caught
gnawing or mumbling over an old bone, there Phosphates are
indispensable, no matter at what cost. Better pay $100 per tun for a
dressing of one hundred pounds of Bone per acre than try to do without.
But no lands recently brought into cultivation--no lands where the bones
of the animals fed thereon have been allowed, for unnumbered years past,
to mingle with the soil--can be equally hungry for Phosphates; and I
doubt that any cotton-field in the South will ever return an outlay of
even $50 per tun for any Phosphatic fertilizer whatever. That _any_
preparation of Bone, or whereof Bone is a principal element, will
increase the succeeding crops, is undoubted; but that it will ever
return its cost and a decent margin of profit, is yet to be demonstrated
to my satisfaction.
No doubt, there are special cases in which the application even of
Peruvian Guano at $90 per tun is advisable. A compost of Muck, Lime,
&c., equally efficient, might be far cheaper; but months would be
required to prepare and perfect it, and meantime the farmer would lose
his crop, or fail to make one. If a tun of Guano, or of some expensive
Phosphate, will give him six or eight acres of Clover where he would
otherwise have little or none, and he needs that Clover to feed the team
wherewith he is breaking up and fitting his farm to grow a good crop
next year, he may wisely make the purchase and application, even though
he may be able to compost for next year's use twice the value of
fertilizers for the precise cost of this. But I am so thorough in my
devotion to "home industry," that I hold him an unskillful farmer who
cannot, nine times in ten, make, mainly from materials to be found on or
near his farm, a pile of compost for $100 that will add more to the
enduring fertility of his farm than anything he can bring from a
distance at a cost of $150.
Understand that this is a general rule, and subject, like all general
rules, to exceptions. Gypsum, I think every farmer should buy; Lime
also, if his soil needs it; Phosphates in some shape, if past ignorance
or folly has allowed that soil to be despoiled of them; Wood Ashes, if
any one can be found so brainless as to sell them; Marl, of course,
where it is found within ten miles; Guano very rarely, and mainly when
something is needed to make a crop before coarser and colder
fertilizers can be brought into a condition of fitness for use; but the
general rule I insist on is this: A good farmer will, in the course of
twenty or thirty years, make at least $10 worth of fertilizers for every
dollar's worth he buys from any dealer, unless it be the sweepings or
other excretions of some not distant city.
I have used Guano frequently, and, though it has generally made its
mark, I never yet felt sure that it returned me a profit over its cost.
Phosphates have done better, especially where applied to Corn in the
hill, either at the time of planting or later; yet my strong impression
is that Flour of Bone, applied broadcast and freely, especially when
Wheat or Oats are sown on a field that is to be laid down to Grass, pays
better and more surely than anything else I order from the City, Gypsum,
and possibly Oyster-Shell Lime, excepted.
My experience can be no safe guide for others, since it is not proved
that the anterior condition and needs of their soils are precisely like
those of mine. I apprehend that Guano has not had a fair trial on my
place--that carelessness in pulverizing or in application has caused it
to "waste its sweetness on the desert air," or that a drouth following
its application has prevented the due development of its virtues. And
still my impression that Guano is the brandy of vegetation, supplying to
plants stimulus rather than nutrition, is so clear and strong that it
may not easily be effaced. It seems to me plainly absurd to send ten
thousand miles for this stimulant, when this or any other great city
annually poisons its own atmosphere and the adjacent waters with
excretions which are of very similar character and value, and which
Science and Capital might combine to utilize at less than half the cost
of like elements in the form of Guano.
My object in this paper is to incite experiment and careful observation.
No farmer should absolutely trust aught but his own senses. A Rhode
Islander once assured me that he applied to four acres of thin, slaty
gravel one hundred pounds per acre of Nitrate of Soda which cost him $4
per hundred, and obtained therefrom four additional tuns of good Hay,
worth $15 per tun: Net profit (after allowing for the cost of making the
Hay), say $30. He might not be so fortunate on a second trial, and there
may not be another four acres of the earth's surface where Nitrate of
Soda would do so well; but, should I ever have a fair opportunity, I
mean to see what a little of that Nitrate will do for _me_. And I hope
farmers may more and more be induced to conform in practice to the
Apostolic precept, "Prove all things: Hold fast that which is good." No
one's success or failure in a particular instance should be conclusive
with others, because of the infinite diversity of antecedent and
attendant circumstances; but if every thrifty farmer would give to each
of the commercial fertilizers--Lime, Gypsum, Guano, Raw Bone,
Phosphates, Ashes, Salt, Marl, etc.--such a careful trial as he might,
observing closely and recording carefully the results, we should soon
have a mass of facts and results, wherefrom deductions might be drawn of
signal practical value to the present and to future generations.
I firmly believe that great results of signal beneficence are to be
slowly but surely achieved by means of the household convenience known
as the Earth-Closet, and by kindred devices for rendering inoffensive
and utilizing the most powerful fertilizer produced on every farm and in
every household. That is a vulgar squeamishness which leaves it to
poison the atmosphere and offend the senses on the assumption that it is
too noisome to be dealt with or utilized. A true refinement counsels
that it be daily covered, and its odor absorbed or suppressed by earth,
or muck, or ashes, and thus prepared for removal to and incorporation
with the soil. It is far within the truth to estimate our National loss
by the waste of this material at $1 per head, or $40,000,000 in all per
annum: a waste which is steadily diminishing the productive capacity of
our soil. This cannot, must not, be allowed to continue. We must devise
or adopt _some_ mode of securing and applying this powerful fertilizer;
and I defer to that which is already in extensive and daily expanding
use. Let whoever can do better; but meantime let us welcome and diffuse
the Earth Closet.
XXI.
MUCK--HOW TO UTILIZE IT.
The time will be, I cannot doubt, when chemists can tell us the exact
positive or relative value of a cord of Muck--how this swamp or that
pond affords a choice article, while the product of another will hardly
pay for digging. There may be chemists whose judgment on these points is
now worth far more than mine, since mine is worth exactly nothing. I
_do_ know, however, that Muck is a valuable fertilizer, and that digging
and composting it _does pay_. I judge that I have transferred at least
three thousand loads of it from my swamp to my upland; and the effect
had been all that I expected. Let me speak of Muck generally, in the
light, of my own experience.
Wherever rocks in ridges come to the surface of a valley, plain, or
gentle slope, water is apt to be collected or retained by them, forming
ponds or shallower pools, which may or may not dry up in Summer, but
which are seldom dry late in Autumn, when plants are dying and leaves
are falling. The latter, caught in their descent by the harsh winds of
the season, are swept along the bare, dry ground, till they strike the
water, which arrests their progress and soon engulfs them. Thus an acre
of watery surface will often collect, and retain the dead foliage of
five to ten acres of forest; and next Fall will render its kindred
tribute, and the next, and the next, for ever. There cannot be less than
fifty millions of acres of Swamps in our old States (including Maine);
whereof I presume the larger area was covered with water until the slow
contributions of leaves and weeds filled them above the level at which
water is no longer retained on the surface. And still, they are so moist
and boggy, and their rank vegetation is so retentive, that the leaves
swept in from the adjacent hills and glades are firmly retained and aid
to increase the depth of their vegetable mold, which varies from a few
inches to twenty and even thirty feet. In my old County of Westchester,
I roughly estimate that there are at least five thousand acres of bog,
whereof but a very few hundreds have yet been subdued to the uses of
cultivation.
Whoever digs a quantity of Swamp Muck and applies it _directly_ to his
fields or garden, will derive little or no immediate benefit therefrom.
It is green, sour, cold, and more likely to cover his farm thickly and
persistently with Sorrel, Eye-smart, Rag-weed, Parsley, and other
infestations, than to add a bushel per acre to his crop of Grain or
Roots. And thus many have tried Muck, and, on trial, pronounced it a
pestilent humbug.
But let any farmer turn his whole force into a bog or marsh directly
after finishing his Summer harvest (when it is apt to be driest and
warmest), and, having freed it of water to the best of his ability, dig
and draw out one hundred cords of its black, oozy substance, and he will
know better than to unite in that hasty judgment. If the bog be near his
farm-yard, let the Muck be shoveled at once into a cart and drawn
thither; but, if not, let it be simply brought out in wheel-barrows and
deposited, not more than two feet deep, on the most convenient bank that
is well drained and perfectly dry. Here let it dry and drain till after
Fall harvest, and then begin to draw it gradually into the yards, and
especially where it may be worked over by swine and scratched over for
seeds and insects by fowls. Assuming that the farm-yard is lowest in the
centre and allows no liquid to escape save by evaporation, the Muck may
well be dumped on the drier sides; thence, after being worked over and
trampled through and through, to be shoveled into the centre and
replaced by fresh arrivals. A hundred cords may thus be so mixed and
ripened as to be fit to draw out next May and used as a fertilizer for
Grain or Roots, though, if not so treated, it should lie exposed to sun
and wind a full year; being applied in the Fall to crops of Winter grain
or spread upon the fields to be planted or sowed next Spring. All the
manure made during the Winter should be spread over that which lies in
the yard at least monthly; and then new Muck drawn in, to be rooted or
scratched over, trampled into the underlying strata, and overspread in
its turn. Thus treated, I am confident that each hundred cords of Muck
will be equal in value to an equal quantity of manure, though it may not
give up its fertilizing properties so freely to the first crop that
follows its application. I have land that did not yield (in pasture) the
equivalent of half a tun of hay pet annum when I bought it, that now
yields at least three tuns of good hay per annum; and its renovation is
mainly due to a free application of Swamp Muck.
To those who have a good stock of animals, with Muck convenient to their
yards, I would not recommend any other treatment than the foregoing; but
there are many who keep few animals, or whose muck-beds lie at the back
of their farms, two or three hundred rods from their barns; while they
wish to fertilize the fields in this quarter, which have been slighted
in former applications, because of the distance over which manure had to
be hauled. If these possess or can buy good hard-wood, house-made Ashes
at twenty-five cents or less per bushel, I would say, Mix these well, at
the rate of two or three bushels to the card, with your Muck as you dig
it; work it over the next Spring, and apply it the ensuing Fall, so as
to give it a full year to ripen and sweeten, and it will be all right.
But, if you have not and cannot get the Ashes, and _can_ procure dirty,
refuse Salt from some meat-packer or wholesale grocer, apply this as you
would have applied the Ashes, but in rather larger quantity; and, if
you can get neither Ashes nor Salt, use quick Lime, as fresh and hot
from the kiln as you can apply it. The best Lime is that from burned
Oyster-Shells; I consider this, if nowise slaked, nearly equal to refuse
Salt; but Oyster-Shell Lime is too dear at most inland points; and here
the refuse of the kilns--that which is not good enough for
mason-work--must be used. Usually, the lime-burner has a load or more of
this at the clearing out of every kiln, which he will sell quite cheap
if it be taken out of his way at once; and this should be looked for and
secured. Being inferior in quality (often because imperfectly burned),
it should be applied in larger quantity--not less than four bushels to
each cord of Muck.
* * * * *
I will not here describe the process of mixing Salt with Lime commended
by Prof. Mapes, because it is not easy to bring these two ingredients
together so as to mix them with the Muck as it is dug: and, though I
have used them after Prof. Mapes's recipe, and purpose to do so
hereafter, I do not feel certain that any positive advantage results
from their blended application as a Chloride of Lime. If I should gain
further light on this point before completing this series, I shall not
fail to impart it.
XXII.
INSECTS--BIRDS.
If I were to estimate the average absolute loss of the farmers of this
country from Insects at $100,000,000 per annum, I should doubtless be
far below the mark. The loss of fruit alone by the devastations of
insects, within a radius of fifty miles from this City, must amount in
value to Millions. In my neighborhood, the Peach once flourished, but
flourishes no more, and Cherries have been all but annihilated. Apples
were till lately our most profitable and perhaps our most important
product; but the worms take half our average crop and sadly damage what
they do not utterly destroy. Plums we have ceased to grow or expect; our
Pears are generally stung and often blighted; even the Currant has at
last its fruit-destroying worm. We must fight our paltry adversaries
more efficiently, or allow them to drive us wholly from the field.
Now, I have no doubt that our best allies in this inglorious warfare are
the Birds. They would save us, if we did not destroy them. The British
plowman, turning his sod with a myriad of crows, blackbirds, etc.,
chasing his steps and all but getting under his feet in their eager
quest of grubs, bugs, etc., is a spectacle to be devoutly thankful for.
Whenever clouds of birds shall habitually darken our fields in May and
(less notably) throughout the Summer months, we may reasonably hope to
grow fair crops of our favorite Fruits from year to year, and realize
that we owe them to the constant, and zealous, though not quite
disinterested, efforts of our friends, the Birds.
But I do not regard the ravages of Insects as entirely due to the
reckless destruction and consequent scarcity of our Birds. I hold that
their multiplication and their devastations are largely incited by the
degeneracy of our plants caused by the badness of our culture. On this
point, consider a statement made to me, some fifteen or twenty years
ago, by the late Gov. William F. Packer, of Pennsylvania:
"I know (said Gov. P.) the narrow valley of a stream that runs into the
west branch of the Susquehanna, which was cleared of the primitive
forest some forty or fifty years since, and has ever since been
alternately in tillage and grass. A road ran through the middle of it,
dividing it into two narrow fields. A few years ago, this road was
abandoned, and the whole of this little valley, including the road-way,
thrown into a single field, which was thereupon sown to Wheat. At
harvest-time, this remarkable phenomenon was presented: A good crop of
sound grain on the strip four or fire rods wide formerly covered by the
road; while nearly every berry on either side of it was destroyed by the
weevil or midge."
Now I do not infer from this fact that insect ravages are _wholly_ due
to our abuse and exhaustion of the soil. I presume that Wheat and other
crops would be devastated by insects if there were no slovenly, niggard,
exhausting tillage. But I do firmly hold that at least half our losses
by insects would be precluded if our fields were habitually kept in
better heart by deep culture, liberal fertilizing, and a judicious
rotation of crops. I heard little of insect ravages in the wheat-fields
of Western New-York throughout the first thirty years of this century;
but, when crop after crop of Wheat had been taken from the same fields
until they had been well nigh exhausted of their Wheat-forming elements,
we began to hear of the desolation wrought by insects; and those ravages
increased in magnitude until Wheat-culture had to be abandoned for
years. I believe that we should have heard little of insects had Wheat
been grown on those fields but one year in three since their redemption
from the primal forest.
But, whatever might once have been, the Philistines are upon us. We are
doomed, for at least a generation, to wage a relentless war against
insects multiplied beyond reason by the neglect and short-comings of our
predecessors. We are in like condition with the inhabitants of the
British isles a thousand years ago, whose forefathers had so long
endured and so unskillfully resisted invasion and spoliation by the
Northmen that they had come to be regarded as the sea-kings' natural
prey. For generations, it has been customary hereabout to slaughter
without remorse the birds, and let caterpillars, worms, grasshoppers,
etc., multiply and ravage unresisted. We must pay for past errors by
present loss and years of extra effort. And, precisely because the task
is so arduous, we ought to lose no time in addressing ourselves to its
execution.
The first step to be taken is very simple. Let every farmer who realizes
the importance and beneficence of Birds teach his own children and
hirelings that, except the Hawk, they are to be spared, protected,
kindly treated, and (when necessary) fed. They are to be valued and
cherished as the voluntary police of our fields and gardens, constantly
employed in fighting our battles against our ruthless foes. The boy who
robs a bird's nest is robbing the farmer of a part of his crops. He who
traverses a farm shooting and mangling its feathered sentinels
diminishes its future product of Grain and nearly destroys that of
Fruit. The farmer might as well consent that any strolling ruffian
should shoot his Horses or Cattle as his Birds. Begin at home to make
this truth felt and respected, and it will be the easier to impress it
also on your neighbors.
Next, there should be neighborhood or township associations for the
protection of insect-eating birds. We must not merely agree to let them
live--we must cherish and protect them. I believe that very simple cups
or bowls of cast-iron, having each a hole in its centre of suitable
size, that need not cost sixpence each, and could be fastened to the
side of a tree with one nail lightly driven, would in time be adopted by
many birds as nesting strongholds, whence they might laugh to scorn
their predacious enemies. If every harmless bird could build its nest
among us in a place where its eggs would be safe from hawks, crows,
cats, boys, and other robbers, the number of such birds would quickly be
doubled and quadrupled.
And we must summon the law to our aid. Though law can do little or
nothing against stealthy, skulking nest-plunderers, it can help us
materially in our warfare with the cowardly vagabonds who traverse our
fields with musket or rifle, blazing away at every unsuspecting robin or
thrush that they can discover. Make it trespass, punishable with fine
and imprisonment, to shoot on another's land without his express
permission, and the cowardly massacre of the farmers' humble allies
would be checked at once, and, when public sentiment had been properly
enlightened, might, in civilized regions, be arrested altogether.
XXIII.
ABOUT TREE-PLANTING.
I have had so little experience in Tree-Planting that I should have
preferred to say no more about it; but letters that have reached me
imply that the ignorance of others is even denser than mine. For the
sake of those only who are conscious that they know nothing, yet are not
unwilling to learn, I venture a few timid suggestions with regard to
Tree-Planting.
I. Ten or twelve years ago, I bought a pound or more of Locust seed
rather late in the Spring, scalded it by plunging for a moment the
little cotton bag which held it into a pot of boiling water, and letting
the seed steep and steam in the bag till next morning, when the seed was
planted in rows in a newly broken bit of poor old pasture-land. This was
a mistake; I should have given that seed the richest available spot in
my garden, to say nothing of planting it as early as April 20th. My
locusts came up slowly and grew feebly that year, not to speak of the
many seeds that did not sprout at all. Still many came up and survived,
and my place is this day the richer for them. It might have been still
richer had I seasonably known more.
II. What I would now advise as to Locust and most other trees is that
the best seed be procured in the Fall, or so soon as it drops from the
trees; that part of it be sown in drills, two feet apart, with two
inches between seeds in the drills, and that the richest of dry, warm
garden-soil be devoted to this purpose. Fill a large box with rich loam,
stir four ounces of seed into this, and set the box in a cool cellar
where frost does not enter, and here let it remain till April; then take
out the seed and earth together, and sow in drills as above. If some one
who cuts Locust during the Winter or Spring will allow you to trace the
smaller surface-roots from the new-made stumps and cut or dig them up,
cut fifty or a hundred pieces of root the size of your finger each two
feet long, and plant these, about May 1, in the places where you want
Locusts to come forward most rapidly. Some of them may not grow, but I
think many will; and, from all these sources, I judge that you will
obtain a good supply of young trees. Let those you start from the seed
get two years' growth before you take them up and set them where you
want trees, whether in your present woods, in rugged, rocky pastures, on
the sides of steep ravines, or around your buildings. You cannot fail to
obtain _some_ trees if you follow these directions.
III. Begin early this Fall to gather Chestnuts, Hickory Nuts, Walnuts,
White Oak, Acorns, etc., to plant. Select the largest and finest nuts,
giving the preference to those which ripen and fall earliest. Keep them
in cool, damp earth in some barn or cellar where rats and mice cannot
reach them, and persist in collecting till December. Then plant a part
in your garden or in any rich ground where they are not likely to be
disturbed; letting the residue remain in the boxes of moist earth where
you first placed them till early Spring; then plant these, like the
former, in rows two feet apart, with six inches between seed and seed in
each row, and give the rows careful culture for two years; after which,
set them where you wish them to grow.
I venture to suggest that he who has a ragged, stony hill or other lot
which he wishes to surrender to forest should plow it, if it can be
plowed, next September or October; if too rocky to be even imperfectly
plowed, dig up the earth with pick and spade, and sow it thickly with
hickory nuts, walnuts, chestnuts, locust and other tree-seeds, expecting
that some will be dug up and carried off by squirrels, etc., and that
others will fail to germinate. Go over it with hoes the ensuing June or
July, killing all weeds and other infestations; and, nearly a year
later, repeat the operation, taking up young trees from your garden or
nursery, and filling them in wherever there is room. Plant thickly in
order to force an upward rather than a scraggy growth; and so that you
may begin to cut out the superfluous saplings for bean-poles,
hoop-poles, etc., three or four years thereafter. Cut late in Winter or
early in Spring, so that the stumps will each throw up two or more
shoots or sprouts, which usually grow much faster than the original tree
did. And the process of thinning may thus be continued indefinitely,
while the choicer trees are allowed to attain their stateliest
proportions. And thus a rocky, sterile hill-side or knoll may be made to
yield a crop annually after the first two or three years from planting,
while growing trees of decided value. I judge that almost any land
within fifty miles of a great city and not more than two miles from a
railroad depot or from navigable water may thus be made to earn a good
interest on $100 per acre, after meeting all the cost of breaking up and
planting. I confidently assert that many thousands of sterile, rocky
acres, which now yield less than $5 per acre annually in pasturage,
would net at least double that sum to the owner if wisely devoted to
forest-trees.
* * * * *
I have a hearty love of forests. They proffer gentle companionship to
the thoughtful and rest to the overworked, fevered brain. Our streams
will be fuller and less capricious, our gales less destructive, our
climate more equable, when we shall have reclothed our rugged slopes and
rocky crests with trees. Timber grows yearly scarcer and dearer, when it
ought to be becoming more plentiful and accessible, and _would_ be if we
devoted to trees all the land which we cultivate at a loss or fail to
cultivate at all. Let our boys be incited to gather seeds and plant
nurseries; let young trees be bought by the thousand where they now are
by the dozen, and let us all cooperate in covering our unsightly rocks
and making glad our waste places by a superabundance of choice, thrifty,
healthy trees.
Many of our young men have a taste for adventure and excitement which
leads them to the ocean, the mines, to Australia or some other far-off
land recently and scantily peopled by civilized beings. I will not
quarrel with their taste; but I judge that there are openings for their
enterprise and daring within the area of our own country. Let one
thousand of them resolve to devote the next five years to planting
forests on the treeless plains and virtual deserts of the Great Basin
and on either side of it; let them select locations where some acres may
cheaply and surely be irrigated, and, having carefully provided
themselves with an abundance of the best seeds, let them start patches
of woodland at points the most remote from present timber, until a
thousand different forests--one to each of the associates--shall have
been started and guarded till their roots have taken firm hold of the
earth. I presume Congress would grant them preemptions to each section
on which they thus planted at least forty acres of forest, and that most
of these preemption rights could, within ten years, be sold to settlers
for many times their original cost.
XXIV.
FRUIT-TREES--THE APPLE.
If I were asked to say what single aspect of our economic condition most
strikingly and favorably distinguished the people of our Northern States
from these of most if not all other countries which I have traversed, I
would point at once to the fruit-trees which so generally diversify
every little as well as larger farm throughout these States, and are
quite commonly found even on the petty holdings of the poorer mechanics
and workmen in every village and in the suburbs and outskirts of every
city. I can recall nothing like it abroad, save in two or three of the
least mountainous and most fertile districts of northern Switzerland.
Italy has some approach to it in the venerable olive-trees which
surround or flank many, perhaps most, of her farm-houses, upholding
grape-vines as ancient and nearly as large as themselves; but the
average New-England or Middle State homestead, with its ample
Apple-orchard and its cluster of Pear, Cherry and Plum-trees surrounding
its house and dotting or belting its garden, has an air of comfort and
modest thrift, which I have nowhere else seen fairly equaled. Upland
Virginia and the mountainous portion of the States southward of her may
in time surpass the most favored regions of the North in the abundance,
variety and excellence of their fruits; for the Peach and the Grape find
here a congenial climate, while they are grown with difficulty, where
they can be grown at all, in the North; but, up to this hour, I judge
that our country north of the Potomac is better supplied with wholesome
and palatable tree-fruits than any other portion of the earth's surface
of equal or nearly equal area.
On the whole, I deem it a misfortune that our Northern States were so
admirably adapted to the Apple and kindred fruit-trees that our pioneer
forefathers had little more to do than bury the seeds in the ground and
wait a few years for the resulting fruit. The soil, formed of decayed
trees and their foliage, thickly covered with the ashes of the primitive
forest, was as genial as soil could be; while the remaining woods, which
still covered seven-eighths of the country, shut out or softened the
cold winds of Winter and Spring, rendering it less difficult, a century
ago, to grow fine peaches in southern New-Hampshire than it now is in
southern New-York. Devastating insects were precluded by those great,
dense woods from diffusing themselves from orchard to orchard as they
now do. Snows fell more heavily and lay longer then than now, protecting
the roots from heavy frosts, and keeping back buds and blossoms in
Spring, to the signal advantage of the husbandman. I estimate that my
apple-trees would bear at least one-third more fruit if I could retard
their blossoming a fortnight, so as to avoid the cold rains and cutting
winds, often succeeded by frosts, which are apt to pay their unwelcome
farewell visits just when my trees are in bloom or when the fruit is
forming directly thereafter. Hence, I say to every one who shall
hereafter set an orchard, Give it the northward slope of a hill if that
be possible. Other things being equal, the orchard which blossoms latest
will, in a series of years, yield most fruit, and will be most likely to
bear when the Apple-crop of your vicinity proves a failure. I do not
recommend storing ice to plant or bury under the trees in April, for
that involves too much labor and expense; yet I have no doubt that even
that has been and sometimes might be done with profit. In the average,
however, I judge that it would not pay.
In locating and setting an orchard, the very first consideration is
thorough drainage. Nothing short of a destructive fire can be more
injurious to an apple-tree than compelling it to stand throughout Winter
and Spring in sour, stagnant water. Barrenness, dead branches, and
premature general decay, are the natural and righteous consequences of
such crying abuse. There are many reasons for choosing sloping or broken
ground for an apple-orchard, whereof comparative exemption from frost
and natural facility of drainage are the most obvious. A level field,
thoroughly undrained to-day, may, through neglect and the mischiefs
wrought by burrowing animals, have become little better than a morass
thirty years hence; but an orchard set on a tolerably steep hillside is
reasonably secure against wet feet to the close of its natural life.
A gravelly or sandy loam is generally preferred for orchards; yet I have
known them to flourish and bear generously on heavy clay. Whoever has a
gravelly field will wisely prefer this for Apples, not merely to clay
but to sand as well.
And, while many young orchards have doubtless been injured by immoderate
applications of rank, green manures, I doubt that any man has ever yet
bestowed too much care and expense on the preparation of his ground for
fruit-trees. Where ridges or plateaus of fast stone do not forbid, I
would say, Turn over the soil to a depth of at least fifteen inches with
a large plow and a strong team; then lift and pulverize the subsoil to a
depth of not less than nine inches; apply all the Wood-ashes you can
get, with one thousand bushels of Marl if you are in a Marl region; if
not, use instead from thirty to fifty bushels of quick Lime
(oyster-shell if that is to be had) with one hundred loads per acre of
Swamp Muck which has lain a year on dry upland, baking in the sun and
wind; and now you may think of setting your trees. If your soil was rich
Western prairie or Middle-State garden to begin with, you can dispense
with all these fertilizers; yet I doubt that there is an acre of Western
prairie that would not be improved by the Lime or (perhaps better
still) a smaller quantity of refuse Salt from a packing-house or meat
retailing grocery. There are not many farms that would not repay the
application of five bushels per acre of refuse Salt at twenty-five cents
per bushel.
Your trees once set--(and he who sets twenty trees per day as they
should be set, with each root in its natural position, and the earth
pressed firmly around its trunk, but no higher than as it originally
grew, is a faithful, efficient worker), I would cultivate the land, (for
the trees' sake), growing crops successively of Ruta Bagas, Carrots,
Beets, and early Potatoes, but no grain whatever, for six or seven
years, disturbing the roots of the trees as little as may be, and
guarding their trunks from tug, or trace, or whiffle-tree, by three
stakes set firmly in the ground about each tree, not so near it as to
preclude constant cultivation with the hoe inside as well as outside of
the stakes, so as to let no weed mature in the field. Apply from year to
year well-rotted compost to the field in quantity sufficient fully to
counterbalance the annual abstraction by your crops. Make it a law
inflexible and relentless that no animal shall be let into this orchard
to forage, or for any purpose whatever but to draw on manures, to till
the soil, and to draw away the crops. Thus until the first blossoms
begin to appear on the trees; then lay down to grass _without_ grain,
unless it be a crop of Rye or Oats to be cut and carried off for feed
when not more than half grown, leaving the ground to the young grass.
Let the grass be mowed for the next two or three years, and
thenceforward devote it to the pasturage of Swine, running over it with
a scythe once or twice each Summer to clear it of weeds, and taking out
the Swine a few days before beginning to gather the Apples, but putting
them back again the day after the harvest is completed. Let the Swine be
sufficiently numerous and hungry to eat every apple that falls within a
few hours after it is dropped, and to insure their rooting out every
grub or worm that burrows in the earth beneath the trees, ready to
spring up and apply himself to mischief at the very season when you
could best excuse his absence. I do not commend this as all, or nearly
all, that should be done in resistance to the pest of insect ravage; but
I begin with the Hog as the orchardist's readiest, cheapest, most
effective ally or servitor in the warfare he is doomed unceasingly to
wage against the spoilers of his heritage. I will indicate some further
defensive enginery in my next chapter.
XXV
MORE ABOUT APPLE-TREES.
In my opinion, Apple-trees, in most orchards, are planted too far apart
and allowed to grow taller and spread their limbs more widely than is
profitable. I judge that a pruner or picker should be able to reach the
topmost twig of any tree with a ten-foot pole, and that no limb should
be allowed to extend more than eight feet from the trunk whence it
springs. Our Autumnal Equinox occurs before our Apples are generally
ripe for harvest, and, finding our best trees bending under a heavy
burden of fruit, its fierce gales are apt to make bad work with trees as
well as apples. The best tree I had, with several others, was thus
ruined by an equinoctial tempest a few years since. Barren trees escape
unharmed, while those heavily laden with large fruit are wrenched and
twisted into fragments. And, even apart from this peril, a hundred
weight of fruit at or near the extremity of limbs which extend ten or
twelve feet horizontally from the trunk, tax and strain a tree more than
four times that weight growing within four or five feet of the trunk,
and on limbs that maintain a semi-erect position. I diffidently
suggest, therefore, that no apple-tree be allowed to exceed fifteen
feet in height, nor to send a limb more than eight feet from its trunk,
and that trees be set (diamond-fashion) twenty-four feet apart each way,
instead of thirty-two, as some of mine were. I judge that the larger
number of trees (72 per acre) will produce more fruit in the average
than the larger but fewer trees grown on squares of two by two rods to
each, that they will thrive and bear longer, and that not one will be
destroyed or seriously harmed by winds where a dozen would if allowed to
grow as high and spread as far as they could.
*
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