AN EXCELLENT COMPOST.
The only stable manure I use on my crops is that made by my cow. All my other fertilizers are artificially produced. In the course of the year, in prosecuting my regular business, I render some two hundred thousand pounds of tallow. This is all done by boiling it with sulphuric acid. The acid attacks and decomposes the animal tissue, leaving the rendered tallow floating on its surface. A part of the dissolved animal tissue, together with the bones that are sometimes smuggled in with the rough fat, settles to the bottom of the tanks, and a part remains dissolved in the acid. This spent acid, together with the deposit in the bottom of the tanks, is the source of all my nitrogen, except what may be in the manure from the cow, as well as a portion of my phosphorous. I have occasion to use considerable of the potash of commerce in some of my manufactures. For my land, I make of this a saturated solution, and then dry it, by stirring into it a mixture of equal parts of ground plaster and sifted coal ashes. This, in a few days, becomes sulphate of potash, lime, and coal ashes, at least I judge that it does, for it loses all its causticity.
In preparing my fertilizers, I mix the product of my tanks with loam, near the place to be planted; this, in the spring, is dug over and mixed with the manure from the stable. The effect of this mixing is to make the manure very fine in a very short time. After plowing, this compost is spread upon the land, and harrowed in. I then follow with ground bone, which costs me, delivered at my place, bolted, twenty-five dollars per ton, at the rate of twelve hundred pounds to the acre, and with the potash mixture, at the rate of two hundred and forty pounds to the acre, which is also harrowed in. In distributing the potash, I distribute more of it where I intend to plant peas or potatoes, and less where I intend to plant corn, squashes, and turnips. In distributing the bone, I reverse this. It is on a light, sandy loam, fertilized in this manner, with an excess of nitrogen, no doubt, that I expect, the coming summer, to raise enough feed for a cow on less than half an acre of ground. The land on which my experiment was tried last year was a turned sod that had had no manure of any kind for more than ten years. This year it will be tried on land that was manured as above last year.
