Deep Spading.—Ames’ garden-spades measure twelve inches in length of blade. In a good soil the foot may gain one or two additional inches by a good thrust. Thus the soil is mellowed to the depth of fourteen inches. This will
do very well; but if you aspire to do the very best, another course must be first pursued. The first spadeful must be thrown out, and a second depth gained, and then the top soil returned. This is comparatively slow and laborious, but it need not be done more than once in five years, and by dividing the garden into sections, and performing this thorough-spading on one of the sections each year, the process will be found, practically, less burdensome than it seems to be.
GETTING POOR ON RICH LAND AND RICH ON POOR LAND.
A close observer of men and things told us the following little history, which we hope will plow very deeply into the attention of all who plow very shallow in their soils.
Two brothers settled together in —— county. One of them on a cold, ugly, clay soil, covered with black-jack oak, not one of which was large enough to make a half dozen rails. This man would never drive any but large, powerful, Conastoga horses, some seventeen hands high. He always put three horses to a large plow, and plunged it in some ten inches deep. This deep plowing he invariably practised and cultivated thoroughly afterward. He raised his seventy bushels of corn to the acre.
This man had a brother about six miles off, settled on a rich White River bottom-land farm—and while a black-jack clay soil yielded seventy bushels to the acre, this fine bottom-land would not average fifty. One brother was steadily growing rich on poor land, and the other steadily growing poor on rich land.
One day the bottom-land brother came down to see the black-jack oak farmer, and they began to talk about their crops and farms, as farmers are very apt to do.
“How is it,” said the first, “that you manage on this poor soil to beat me in crops?”
They reply was “I WORK my land.”
That was it, exactly. Some men have such rich land that they won’t work, it; and they never get a step beyond where they began. They rely on the soil, not on labor, or skill, or care. Some men expect their LANDS to work, and some men expect to WORK THEIR LAND;—and that is just the difference between a good and a bad farmer.