When sugar-beets are grown for food, we may safely manure them as we would mangel-wurzel, and treat the two crops precisely alike.
I usually raise from ten to fifteen acres of mangel-wurzel every year. I grow them in rotation with other crops, and not as the Hon. Harris Lewis and some others do, continuously on the same land. We manure liberally, but not extravagantly, and get a fair yield, and the land is left in admirable condition for future crops.
I mean by this, not that the land is specially rich, but that it is very clean and mellow.
“In 1877,” said the Deacon, “you had potatoes on the land where you grew mangels the previous year, and had the best crop in the neighborhood.”
This is true, but still I do not think it a good rotation. A barley crop seeded with clover would be better, especially if the mangels were heavily manured. The clover would get the manure which had been washed into the subsoil, or left in such a condition that potatoes or grain could not take it up.
There is one thing in relation to my mangels of 1876 which has escaped the Deacon. The whole piece was manured and well prepared, and dibbled in with mangels, the rows being 2½ feet apart, and the seed dropped 15 inches apart in the rows. Owing to poor seed, the mangels failed on about three acres, and we plowed up the land and drilled in corn for fodder, in rows 2½ feet apart, and at the rate of over three bushels of seed per acre. We had a great crop of corn-fodder.
The next year, as I said before, the whole piece was planted with potatoes, and if it was true that mangels are an “enriching crop,” while corn is an “exhausting” crop, we ought to have had much better potatoes after the mangels than after corn. This was certainly not the case; if there was any difference, it was in favor of the corn. But I do not place any confidence in an experiment of this kind, where the crops were not weighed and the results carefully ascertained.
Mr. Lawes has made some most thorough experiments with different manures on sugar-beets, and in 1876 he commenced a series of experiments with mangel-wurzel.
The land is a rather stiff clay loam, similar to that on which the wheat and barley experiments were made. It is better suited to the growth of beets than of turnips.