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No sooner had the autumn of my second year fairly
set in, and the leaves fallen, than I turned my attention more closely
than ever to the subject of providing an abundant supply of manure, in
hopes of being able to devise some plan by which to lessen the large cash
outlay necessary to be annually made for it. I did not grudge the money
for manure, any more than the sugar on my strawberries. Both were
absolutely necessary; but economy in providing manure was as legitimate a
method of increasing my profits as that of purchasing it. I knew it must
be had in abundance: the point was, to increase the quantity while
diminishing the outlay. Thus resolved, I kept Dick more actively at work
than ever in gathering leaves all over the neighborhood, and when he had
cleaned up the public roads, I then sent him into every piece of woods to
which the owner would grant me access. In these he gathered the mould and
half-rotted leaves which thickly covered the ground. I knew that he would
thus bring home a quantity of pestiferous seeds, to plague us in the shape
of weeds, but by this time we had learned to have no fear of them. By
steadily pursuing this plan when no snow lay on the ground, he piled up in
the barnyard a most astonishing quantity of leaves. There happened to be
but little competition in the search for them, so that he had the ground
clear for himself. All this addition to the manure heap cost me nothing.
To this I added many hogsheads of bones, which the small boys of the
neighborhood gathered up from pig-pens, slaughter-houses, and other
places, and considered themselves well paid at ten cents a bushel for
their labor. These were laid aside until the best and cheapest method
could be devised for reducing them to powder, and so fitting them for use.
In the meantime, I frequently walked for miles away
into the country, making acquaintance with the farmers, observing their
different modes of cultivation, what crops they produced, and especially
their methods of obtaining manures. As before observed, farmers have no
secrets. Hence many valuable hints were obtained and treasured up, from
which I have subsequently derived the greatest advantage. Some of these
farmers were living on land which they had skinned into the most squalid
poverty, and were on the high-road to being turned off by the sheriff.
Others were manured at a money cost which astonished me, exceeding any
outlay that I had made, but confirming to the letter all my preconceived
opinions on the subject, that one acre thoroughly manured is worth ten
that are starved. Of one farmer I learned particulars as to the history of
his neighbor, which I felt a delicacy in asking of the latter himself.
Some instances of success from the humblest
beginnings were truly remarkable; but in all these I found that faith in
manure lay at the bottom.
One case is too striking to be omitted. A German,
with his wife, and two children just large enough to pull weeds and drive
a cow, had settled, seven years before, on eight acres, from which the
owner had been driven by running deeply in debt at the grog-shop. The
drunkard's acres had of course become starved and desolate; the fences
were half down, there was no garden, and the hovel, in which his unhappy
family was once snugly housed, appeared ready to take its departure on the
wings of the wind. Every fruit-tree had died. In this squalid condition
the newly arrived German took possession, with the privilege of purchasing
for $600. His whole capital was three dollars. He began with four pigs,
which he paid for in work. The manure from these was daily emptied into an
empty butter-firkin, which also served as a family water-closet, and the
whole was converted into liquid manure, which was supplied to cabbages and
onions. A gentleman who lived near, and who noted the progress of this
industrious man, assured me that even in the exhausted soil where the
crops were planted, the growth was almost incredible. On turnips and
rutabagas the effect was equally great. Long before winter set in, this
hero had bought a cow, for while his own crops were growing he had earned
money by working around the neighborhood. He readily obtained credit at
the store, for he was soon discovered to be
deserving. When away at work, his wife plied the hoe, and acted as
mistress of the aforesaid butter-tub, while the children pulled weeds. His
cabbages and roots exceeded any in the township; they discharged his
little store-bills, and kept his cow during the winter, while the living
cow and the dead pigs kept the entire family, for they lived about as
close to the wind as possible.
This man's passion was for liquid manure. If he had
done so much with a tub, he was of course comparatively rich with a cow.
Then he sunk a hogshead in the ground, conducted the wash of the kitchen
into it, and there also emptied the droppings from the cow. It was
water-closet for her as well as for the family. It is true that few of us
would fancy such a smelling-bottle at the kitchen door; but it never
became a nuisance, for he kept it innoxious by frequent applications of
plaster, which improved as well as purified the whole contents. It was
laborious to transport the fluid to his crops, but a wheelbarrow came the
second year to lessen the labor. There happened, by the merest accident,
to be a quarter of an acre of raspberries surviving on the place. He dug
all round these to the depth of eighteen inches, trimmed them up, kept out
the weeds, and gave them enormous quantities of liquid manure. The yield
was most extraordinary, for the second year of his location there he sold
$84 worth of fruit. This encouraged him to plant more, until at the end of
four years he had made enough, from his
raspberries alone, not only to pay for his eight acres, but to accumulate
a multitude of comforts around him. In all this application of liquid
manure his wife had aided him with unflagging industry.
It was natural for me to feel great interest in a
case like this, so I called repeatedly to see the grounds and converse
with the German owner. As it was seven years from his beginning when I
first became acquainted with him, his little farm bore no resemblance to
its condition when he took possession. There were signs of thrift all over
it. His fences were new, and clear of hedgerows; his house had been
completely renovated; he had built a large barn and cattle-sheds, while
his garden was immeasurably better than mine. Everything was in a
condition exceeding all that I had seen elsewhere. His two girls had grown
up into handsome young women, and had been for years at school. All this
time he had continued to enlarge his means of manufacturing and applying
liquid manure, as upon its use he placed his main dependence. He had sunk
a large brick cistern in the barnyard, into which all the liquor from six
cows and two horses was conducted, as well as the wash from the pigpen
and the barnyard. A fine pump in the cistern enabled him to keep his
manure heap constantly saturated, the heap being always under cover, and
to fill a hogshead mounted on wheels, from which he discharged the
contents over his ground. The tub and underground hogshead with which he
commenced were of course obsolete. If it be possible to build a monument
out of liquid manure, here was one on this farm of eight acres. Its owner
developed another peculiarity—he had no desire to buy more land.
This man's great success in a small way could not
have been achieved without the most assiduous husbanding of manure, and
this husbanding was accomplished by soiling his cow. As he increased his
herd he continued the soiling system; but as it required more help, so he
abandoned working for others and hired whatever help was necessary. The
increase of his manure heap was so great that his little farm was soon
brought into the highest possible condition. In favorable seasons he could
grow huge crops of whatever he planted. But his progress was no greater
than has repeatedly been made by others, who thoroughly prosecute the
soiling system.
A frequent study of this remarkable instance of
successful industry, led me to conclude that high farming must consist in
the abundant use of manure in a liquid state. A fresh reading of forgotten
pages shed abundance of new light upon the subject. The fluid excretia of
every animal is worth more than the solid portion; but some are not
contented with losing the fluid portions voided by the animals
themselves, but they suffer the solid portions of their manure to undergo
destructive fermentation in their barnyards, and thus to become soluble,
and part, by washing, with the more valuable portions. Now it is well
known that the inorganic matter in barnyard manure is always of a superior
character, therefore valuable as well as soluble; and this is regularly
parted with from the soil by those who permit the washings to be wasted by
running off to other fields or to the roadside. I have seen whole
townships where every barnyard on the roadside may be found discharging a
broad stream of this life-blood of the farm into the public highway. The
manure heap must be liquefied before the roots of plants can be benefited
by the food it contains. No portion of a straw decomposed in the soil can
feed a new plant until it is capable of being dissolved in water; and this
solution cannot occur without chemical changes, whose conditions are
supplied by the surroundings. Such changes can be made to occur in the
barnyard by saturating the compost heap with barnyard liquor. All that
nature's laws would in ten years effect in manures in an ordinary state,
when ploughed into the ground, are ready, and occur in a single season,
when the manures are presented to the roots of plants in a liquid form.
A suggestion appropriate to this matter may be made
for the consideration of ingenious minds. Every farmer knows that a manure
heap, when first composted, abounds in clods of matted ingredients so
compact, that time alone will thoroughly reduce them to that state of
pulverization in which manure becomes an available stimulant to the roots
of plants. Fermentation, the result of composting or turning
over a manure heap, does measurably destroy their cohesion, but not
sufficiently. Few can afford to let their compost heaps remain long enough
for the process of pulverization to become as perfect as it should be.
Hence it is taken to the field still composed of hard clods, around which
the roots may instinctively cluster, but into which they vainly seek to
penetrate. Some careful farmers endeavor to remedy this defect by
laboriously spading down the heap as it is carted away. The operation is a
slow one, and does not half prepare the manure for distribution. A year
or two is thus required for these clods to become properly pulverized, for
they remain in the soil inert and useless until subsequent ploughings and
harrowing reduce them to powder.
As farmers cannot wait for time to
perform this office in the manure heap, they should have machinery to do
the work. A
wooden cylinder, armed with long iron
teeth, and revolving rapidly in a horizontal position, with the manure fed
in at the top through a capacious hopper, would tear up the clods into
tatters, and deliver the whole in the exact condition of fine powder,
which the roots of all plants require. To do this would require less time
and labor than the present custom of cutting down with either spade or
drag. Better still, if the manure could be so broken up as it is taken
from the barnyard to the compost heap; the process of disintegration thus
begun would go on through the entire mass, until, when carted away, it
would be
found almost as friable as an ash heap. It is by
contact of the countless mouths of the roots with minute particles of
manure that they suck up nutriment, not by contact with a dense clod.
Hence the astonishing and immediate efficacy of liquid manure. In that the
nutriment has been reduced to its utmost condition of divisibility, and
when the liquid is applied to the soil, saturation reaches the entire
root, embracing its marvellous network of minute fibres, and affording to
each the food which it may be seeking.
We cannot use liquid manures on a large scale, but
thorough pulverization of that which is solid is a very near approach to
the former. Immerse a compact clod in water, and the latter will require
time to become discolored. But plunge an equal bulk of finely pulverized
manure into water, and discoloration almost instantly occurs. Diffusion is
inevitable from contact with the water. Now as rain is water, so a heavy
shower falling on ground beneath which great clods of manure have been
buried, produces in them no more liquefaction than it does on that which
has been dropped in a bucket. On the other hand, if the ground be charged
with finely pulverized manure, a soaking rain will immediately penetrate
all its comminuted particles, extract the nutriment, and deliver it,
properly diluted, into the open mouths of the millions of little rootlets
which are waiting for it. Practically, this is liquid manure on the
grandest scale. But no one can quickly realize its superior benefits from
a newly buried compost heap, unless the latter
has been effectually pulverized before being deposited either in or upon
the ground.
I was so impressed by the example of the
thriving German referred to, that I resolved to imitate him. He had given
me a rich lesson in the art of manufacturing manures cheaply, though I
thought it did not go far enough. Yet I made an immediate beginning by
building a tank in the barnyard, into which the wash from stable, pig-pen,
and yard was conducted. This was pumped up and distributed over the top
of the manure heap under the shed, once or twice weekly. A huge compost
heap was made of leaves,
each layer being saturated with the liquor as the heap accumulated, so
that the whole mass was moist with fluid manure. It was never suffered to
become dry. Now, as in the centre of a manure heap there is no winter,
decomposition went on at a rapid rate, especially among the leaves,
stimulated by the peculiar solvents contained in the liquor. Thus, when
taken out for use in the spring, both heaps had become reduced to a half
fluid mass of highly concentrated manure, in a condition to be converted,
under the first heavy rain, into immediate food for plants. Though my
money cost for manure for next season would be greater than before, yet my
home manufacture was immense. As I was sure that high manuring was the key
to heavy crops and high profits, so my studies, this winter, were as
diligently pursued in the barnyard as in the library, and I flattered
myself that I had gathered hints
enough among my neighbors to
enable me, after next year, to dispense entirely with the purchasing of
manure.
But I had other reasons for avoiding the purchase of
manure—none can be purchased clear of seeds, such as grass and weeds. I
have already suffered severely from the foul trash that has been sold to
me. One strong warning of the magnitude of the nuisance was given by the
condition of my strawberries. A small portion of them was covered, at the
approach of winter, with litter from the barnyard, and another portion
with cornstalks. The object was protection from the cold; and it may be
added that the result, so far as protection goes, was very gratifying. But
when the covering was removed in April, the ground protected by the
barnyard litter was found to be seeded with grass and other seeds, while
that protected by the cornstalks was entirely clean. During a whole year I
had the utmost difficulty to get the first piece of ground clear of these
newly planted pests, and am sure that the labor thus exerted cost more
than the strawberries were worth. From this sore experience I have
learned never to cover this fruit with barnyard litter. When they are
covered, cornstalks alone are used. They are drawn back into the balks in
April, where they serve as a mulch to keep down the weeds, and ultimately
decay into manure. Though not so neat to look at, nor so convenient to
handle as straw, yet they answer quite as well, and at the same time cost
a great deal less.
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