If you will introduce the plough after the first breaking up, either before or after planting; and squares are the most commodious for thorough stirring and cleaning; plough shallow; so as not to disturb the deeply buried sod. Let the harrows level and flatten your surface at the next operation; and continue them exclusively in all future stirrings. Your culture will be easier, cheaper, and more abundantly profitable, than those who are accustomed to the old modes will believe, until they see.
If your field requires drains, draw furrows in proper places. If it be naturally wet, break up deeply in very broad lands, on which the harrows may still be used, and drains sufficiently multiplied. If it be stony, rugged, or harsh, either plant other crops; or strengthen your harrows; ridged ground dries the soonest, and burns through; so does all shallow ploughed soil, whether ridged or flat. Attraction of moisture is trifling, and evaporation rapid.
Be not afraid of cutting corn roots, which benefit by excision; throwing out, on the parts attached to the plants, numerous fibres, to draw in and communicate their food.
Your corn, in deeply ploughed and frequently stirred ground, will resist storms and heavy rains, owing to the strength and numbers of its roots, far beyond hilled or ridged plants. If it yields to the storm, and leans, the extent, tenacity, and re-acting contraction of the roots, will generally restore the erect position of the stalks: whereas, in the ridged or hill culture, the roots are short, brittle, and incapable of recovery. It is not uncommon in the deep and flat culture, for those called finger roots, to grow entirely or greatly extended under instead of above the surface; and throw out innumerable fibres, to support the stalk.
Detach all suckers, which are robbers; and top, in due season, to shorten the lever, insure the standing of the stalks, and facilitate the ripening of the grains.
Banish all apprehensions, that working among corn in dry weather, is injurious. The contrary is the truth; for your harrows will, in such weather, have the double effect of more certainly destroying weeds, and pulverizing, to open mouths to take in moisture and gases, from the dews and the air.
It being seldom practised in Pennsylvania, I need not warn you against sowing winter grain in the same year with corn. This not only scourges your land, but interferes with the great use of the cleaning culture, affording the time and opportunity for weeds to recover their pestiferous reign, and is a sure test of slovenly and covetous farming.
If you will not at once believe in this system of corn husbandry, now frequently and ever successfully practised, where the best crops are to be seen, try a small portion of your field—do it justice—and compare it with the old mode, for your own and your neighbour's conviction. Whatever may be hastily thought of these observations, they are, with the most friendly wishes for their prosperity, offered for the serious consideration of liberal minded and unprejudiced farmers; among whom numberless instances of good farming, in other respects, are to be found, and to which the greatest proportion of the corn culture is a mortifying contrast.
September 10, 1820.
MENTOR.