Knoxville weekly chronicle. [volume] (Knoxville, Tenn.) 1870-1875, 1872-05-22
FARM AND GARDEN.
How TO Restore Fertility.

Agriculture presents no problem more
difficult of solution than that of restoring
huitfulness to an impoverished field in the
most economical way. A practice that
will do best in one soil and climate, may
signally fail where the conditions and sub
stances are entirely different. In the mat
ter of soils and subsoils, parent rocks, eli
mates and plants, nature delights in an
endless variety. Hence our best rules for
practice have necessarily many exceptions.
1 shall state facts briefly, and let the read
er draw his own conclusions from them,
how one can best restore fertility, or inn
part it toland that is naturally poor, and it
may be, nearly worthless.
Wood ashes and land plaster have been
used about one hundred years in this coun-
try to increase the fertility of land, and
both have stood the test of this long eX =
perience. Col. Wilder of Massachusetts, is
reported as saying at public agricultural
discussion, that he regarded good ashes as
worth fifty cents bushel to apply to the
common poor lands of New England.
Others of much experience in their use
spoke in high terms in favor of ashes as a
top-dressing for meadows and pastures.
Some use plaster and others salt, or both,
with ashes, on clover and other plants, at
a large profit. Simple and truthful as
these statements are, there are very few
farmers who understand their full mean
ing as compared with stable and cowyard
manure. AS general fact, not over two
or three parts in q hundred, and often less,
are incombustible in the solid droppings of
farm stock. There is no part of cowdung
or plants that will rise into the air when
either decomposes which will not fall again
as plant food to the earth in rain or dew.
If this were not so, 1t would be impossible
for wood ashes, plaster, and soluble phos-
pilates to act precisely like good stable
manure. Most obviously good mineral
fetilizers are nothing but the best stable
manure with all the volatile or gaseous
parts left out.
For sixty years, the writer has seen with
his own eyes the fertilizing power of plas-
ter, ashes and lime, and 1t is about that
length of time since Sir Humphrey Davy,
Black and other chemists, taught conf
IDENTIFY that plants were composed of COM
bustible carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nj
trogen. Before Liebig wrote a word on
agriculture, the fact that decaying forest
leaves send millions of tons of carbon year
ly into the atmosphere, suggested to others
as we'll as to him that this carbon in some
way returned into new plant growth. For
himself, the writer had no doubt, when a
student fifty years ago, said that plants fed
largely on air and water, like moss grow
ing on rock. The farmer must learn to
utilize in thousand ways this power in
clover, grass and other plants, to organize
air and water, that will cost him next to
nothing, and convert them into staple
crops. In an address before the Monroe
County Agricultural Society, in October,
1874, and published in the GeneSee Farmer
by the writer, may be found these words :
"I regard it as one. of the greatest dis
coveries of the age, that about ninty-seven
per cent. of the ingredients which make
up the whole substance of wheat, rye,
corn, barley, oats, peas and beans exists in
the air in inexhaustible quantities. To
transmute these eriform bodies into the
plants named and into grass and
roots, at the smallest expense, is the object
of nearly all your hard work."
What regarded thirty years ago as "the
greatest discovery of the age" has not yet
come home to the knowledge OF apprecia'
ton of American farmers. In 1S45, when
Secretary of the New York State Agricul-
tural Society, lectured in nearly half the
counties in the State on the above and
kindred topics, but the idea of making
agriculture science and learned profes
sion, was generally regarded as the dream
of visionary.-[D. Lee, Knox Co., Tenn.
in Country Gentleman.