Thomas County cat. [volume] (Colby, Kan.) 1885-1891, 1886-01-28
BLUEGRASS Fertility.
Kentucky Farms Productive After Guilt
walton Of Seventy-fve Years.

Kentucky Farms Productive After . Guilt
walton Of seventy-fve Years.
The evidences of this fertility are ev-
erywhere apparent. Nature, even in
those places where she has been forced
for nearly hundred years to bear so
much at the hands of a not always ju-
dicious agriculture, increasingly strug-
giles to cover herself with bushes of all
sorts and nameless annual weeds and
grasses. Even the bluegrass contends
in vain for complete possession of its
freehold. One 10 forced, living here
year after year, to note, even though
without the least sentiment. the rich
pageant OF transitory wild-boOm that
.c5u force passage for itself over the
landscape: ornaments of golden dande-
lions IN the lawns; vast beds of viOlets,
gray and blue, lin DINNER bosky g'ades;
patches of Haunting suntlowers along
the road-sides; purple thistles, and. of
deeper purple still. and far denser
growth, beautiful iron-w eed in the
woods; with many clumps of alder
bloom, and fast-extending patches of
perennial blackberry, and groups of
delicate Map-apples, and whole fields
OF dog-fennel and golden-rod. And
why mention coarser things-indomita
bic dock and gigantic poke, burrs and
plenteous nightshade, and AEllein and
plantain, with dusty gray-green rag
weed and thrifty fox-tail?-an innanser-
able throng.
Maize and pumpkins and beans grow
together in a tield-a triple crop.
Nature perfeets them all. yet must do
more Scarcely have the plows left
the long burrows before there springs
up varied wild growth, and fourth
crop, morning-glofies, festoon the tall
tassels of the Indian corn ere the knife
can be laid against the stalk. Harvest
fields usually have their barns well hid
den by rich, deep aftermath. Garden
patches, for all that persistent hoe and
rake can do, commonly look at last
like spots given over to weeds and
grasses. Sidewalks quickly lose their
borders. PavementS world soon dis
appear from sight; the winding of dis
tant stream through the fields can be.
followed by the lines of eommunistic.
vegetation that rushes there to fight for,
life. from the minutest creeping vines
TO forest trees. Every neglected fence
corner becomes an area for fresh COZ
ony- Leave one of these sweet,
huManized woOdlawn pastures alone
for short period of years. it runs wild
with dense young natural forest;
vines shoot up to the tops Of the tallest
trees, and then tumble over i'm green
sprays on the heads of others.
A kind. true, patient, self-helpfnl soil
if ever there was one! Some of these
lands after being cultivated, not al
ways scientifically, but always without
artificial fertilizers, for more than
of a century. are now,
if properly treated, equal in productive
ness to the best farming lands of En-
gland. The farmer from one of these
old fields will take two different crops
in season. He gets two cuttings of
clover from 4 meadow, and has rich
grazing left. A few of these counties
have ut time produced three-fourths
of the entire hemp product Of the
United States The State itself has 1T
different times stood first in wheat and
hemp and Indian corn and wool and
tobacco and flax, and this although
half its territory is covered with virgin
forests. When lands under improper
treatment have become impoverished,
their productiveness has been restored,
not by artificial fertilizers, but by
simple rotation of crops. with natures
own help. The soil rests on decom-
possible limestone. which annually
gives up to it in solution all the essen
tial mineral plant food that a judicious
system of agriculture should ever re-
Lane Allen, in Hd,per's
Magazine.