Part 4

Procure a small quantity of clay from some clay bank. Place in a warm place to dry, and in a day or two you can crush it into a soft, impalpable powder. Pinch a little between the fingers and it appears to stick together slightly. Place some in a bottle of water, cork it tight and shake the bottle. The powder floats in the water in clouds, till the water appears completely filled with it. Let the bottle stand and it will be many hours before the clay settles and the water becomes clear. Wet some of the dry clay, and it forms a sticky, pasty mass, that has a soft, greasy feeling between the fingers. Spread some of the soft, pasty mass over a sieve, and pour water on it and the water will hardly pass through the sieve at all. Spread some wet clay over a rough board, and pour water over it, and the clay will cling to the board a long time before it is swept away. Place a lump of wet clay in the sun and it will be many hours before it is entirely dry. Spread some of the wet clay over a dish and place it in the sun, and when it slowly dries it will be found full of cracks. Place a lump of wet clay in an oven and it will dry hard like stone.

Place some of the wet clay in a pot and scatter fine seeds over it. The seeds may sprout and try to grow, but they will probably perish as tender roots are unable to push their way through the sticky clay.

After all these experiments have been performed with the clay and sand, another experiment can be made by drying both the clay and sand and then mixing them together in equal parts. When well mixed place in a pot and scatter fine seeds upon the mixture. Water well, and place in a sunny window; and the plants will sprout and grow longer and better than in either the pure sand or pure clay.

These experiments with the lump of clay show that if soil consists wholly of clay, it must be a poor place for plants. In every hard rain the water, instead of sinking into the soil to supply the plants, would run away over the surface and be wasted. After slow soaking rains the soil would remain wet and cold for a long time. When the sun dries the soil it splits and cracks and tears the roots of plants growing in it. This sticky, pasty soil sticks to spade and plows and we find it hard, slow work to cultivate it. A pure clay from these would appear to be a poor soil for plants. We must not, however, be led astray by our experiments, as it is not easy to find a soil composed wholly of clay. It is usually mixed with other things and then forms a valuable part of the best soils. Sand alone would be a poor soil. Clay alone would be a poorer soil. Mixed together and mixed with other things, they make a part of all good soils.

Organic and Inorganic Matter.--Organic matter is something that has life, or has had life at some time. The organic matter in the soil has been supplied by animals and plants, in one way or another. All else is inorganic. Both organic and inorganic matters are necessary to the existence of plants. Peaty soils wholly organic will not grow plants, neither will sandy soils wholly sand. Inorganic matter forms the foundation of soils and generally forms from eighty to ninety per cent of the whole soil.

Testing Soils for Clay, Sand and Organic Matter.--Take from the ground you wish to test, a peck of soil and place on a board in a round heap, and with a trowel stir it until completely mixed. Then pile into a heap and divide into four equal parts. Next weigh out eight ounces, and spread it out to dry. When dry weigh it and note the loss by air-drying. Next put the soil in a pan and place it in an oven for three hours. Then take the soil out of the pan and weigh it, noting the loss by fire-drying. It is now dry soil and to estimate the organic and inorganic matter, place an iron shovel over the fire, and when red hot put the dry soil on it, let it burn, stirring it occasionally as it burns. It will smoke and smoulder away to ashes and dust. When it ceases to smoke, carefully weigh the ashes. This ash represents the inorganic sand and clay parts of the soil. All the organic matter disappeared in the smoke.

Now take this ash and pour it in a bottle of water. Shake the bottle well and then set on a table, and just so soon as the water becomes still the sand will immediately settle at the bottom, while the clay will remain for some time making the water muddy. As soon as the sand has settled, pour the muddy or clay water off, being careful not to pour any of the sand with it. Then pour some clear water in the bottle on the sand, shake it and pour sand water and all on a cloth fine enough to catch the sand. Dry the sand and weigh it. If it weighs two ounces, then out of the four ounces of dry soil you have tested you have two ounces of sand, one ounce of clay and one ounce of organic matter. Or your soil is twenty-five per cent organic matter and twenty-five per cent clay, and fifty per cent sand. You have a loam soil.

Testing Soils with Plant Foods and Lime.--In the field to be tested, select as level a place as possible and mark out ten squares, each measuring one rod on each side. Place these in two rows leaving spaces three feet wide between the squares. These empty spaces are to be kept clear of weeds and used as walks. Each square should be marked by stakes at the corners, and properly numbered as in the accompanying diagram.

The squares are to be planted with the same crop and well cultivated through the season. Two of these squares, Nos. 2 and 9, are to have no fertilizers, that they may serve as a check or guide in testing the other squares. Square No. 1 is to have a fertilizer containing nitrogen only. No. 4 potassium and phosphorous combined; No. 5 potassium alone; No. 6 nitrogen and phosphorus; No. 7 phosphorus alone; No. 8 all three plant foods combined, and No. 10 is to have calcium only.

No. 1. Potassium and Nitrogen No. 2. No Fertilizer

No. 3. Nitrogen No. 4. Potassium and Phosphorus

No. 5. Potassium No. 6. Nitrogen and Phosphorus

No. 7. Phosphorus No. 8. Nitrogen Phosphorus Potassium

No. 9. No Fertilizer No. 10. Calcium

Apply the fertilizers and work them in the soil about four inches deep before the crop is planted. Plant the same variety of seed on all the squares at the same time, and carefully cultivate through the entire season, treating all exactly alike. Suppose that potatoes have been used. During the growing season, carefully watch the different plats and notice if any one or more seems more or less thrifty than others. Notice which plat appears to mature first, which blooms first and keep a record of all observations. At the end of the season, carefully dig the crop on each square, gathering all the tubers large and small, and weigh each lot. First weigh the crops on squares 2 and 9. This will serve as a standard of comparison, as it will show the natural condition of the soil. Record the weights in each lot and just for illustration we may say that they run something like this: Average of 2 and 9, 80 pounds; No. 1, 380 pounds; No. 3, 250 pounds; No. 4, 360 pounds; No. 5, 350 pounds; No. 6, 300 pounds; No. 7, 220 pounds; No. 8, 400 pounds; No. 10, 120 pounds.

On the particular soil we are supposed to be testing, we can clearly see that the land is benefited in some degree by every element used. Calcium helps, and that means that it should be used on that soil in addition to all of the others. This land plainly needs all four elements and needs potassium especially.

What to Do.--After having gone through with Mr. Barnard’s experiments, you will have a practical idea of what your soil is, and what it needs. The only remaining questions then are those of preparing the soil, and obtaining and applying the plant foods and the lime.

A cold, wet, clay soil needs to be made warmer and lighter, and a light, sandy soil, being too dry, needs some moisture-retaining substance. If conditions are favorable, it would be well at odd time to put sand on the clay soil and clay on the sandy soil; but in most cases this is too expensive, and therefore not practical. To redeem poor lands then, you will have to depend almost entirely upon green manure and lime. Barnyard manures are, of course, at all times, with all soils, the best of all fertilizers, as they return to the soil by the laws of nature, what has been taken from them, or what it should have. Besides the plant foods, it furnishes additional organic matter or humus, which makes the soil lighter and facilitates plant growth by furnishing food to bacteria essential to plant life. The trouble about barn-yard manure is its scarcity. Every farm needs more plant food and humus than can be supplied with common manure.

In the fall, apply 500 pounds of lime per acre to the poor land to be redeemed, break it and prepare it thoroughly, and seed it to rye. In the spring when the rye heads out, turn it under and sow cow peas. When the peas mature, scatter lime, 500 pounds to the acre, over them and turn them under. The lime will prevent the green stuff from souring the soil, will decompose it and fit it for plant food, and will prepare the soil to accept any other foods that may be applied. Follow the peas with wheat, or wheat and clover.

The land once redeemed, do not wear it out again, but preserve its fertility by the use of high-grade commercial fertilizers and barn-yard manure, always rotating the crops so as to get back to some leguminous crop and lime at least once every four years.

Do not retard agricultural education by making warfare on commercial fertilizers, for they are indispensable to every farmer in preserving the fertility of the soil. The world employs the use of just about one-tenth of the artificial fertilizers it should use, and about one-half of what is used is used intelligently. Make war on low grade fertilizers that have the attractive but deceiving feature of cheapness, and buy grade fertilizers by the unit under the guidance of the requirements of your soil.

Phosphatic Limestone.

The use of lime has been and is being sadly neglected, especially in the Southern States and, when it is absolutely necessary to all soils in which it does not exist or exists only in small or insufficient quantities, it does look like the move to provide it is one of imperative moment. Look at the Bluegrass Region of Tennessee and Kentucky, the fairest and most fertile of God’s country. What made it? The dissolution and weathering away of the original phosphatic limestone rock. It is strictly a limestone country and teaches one of nature’s great lessons that the agricultural world should accept and be profited thereby.

All the limestone of this region contains more or less bone phosphate of lime, and in this fact lies the whole secret. In the past ages the foliage from the thick mass of trees and other vegetable growth fell to the ground, soured, and formed an acid which immediately attacked the bone phosphate of lime and converted it into phosphoric acid, while the calcium carbonate or lime decomposed all vegetable matter and conditioned it for plant food, neutralizing all acids and stood ready itself to enter into all future and standing vegetable growth. Now the forests have given place to the cleared fields and we no longer have the dropping from the trees to enrich our soils, neither have we in our fields in sections devoid of limestone any vegetation with roots that extend deep enough in the earth to bring up the carbonate of lime sufficient to support our crops. Therefore the vegetable matter the cheapest of all manures, we provide by turning under green leguminous or nitrogen-gathering plants. These plants sour and finally decompose, but without carbonate of lime to perform its important duties of creating plant food out of this decayed matter, all the fertilizer you get from your crop is the nitrogen it has gathered from the air. Then why not use powdered Tennessee phosphatic-limestone containing enough calcium carbonate (not quick lime) to furnish desired results and no more bone phosphate of lime than will be entirely and immediately converted into plant food. If this phosphatic-limestone product is used with leguminous crops, potash is the only plant food that you will have to provide during the two crop seasons following; however, every soil that has a clay subsoil is a safe bank that will retain all you place on deposit, and if you have the money to spare, deposit it in the soil by investing in high-grade fertilizers and draw a high rate of interest on it instead of letting it stand idle. The calcium in the phosphatic limestone will absolutely correct all free acids in the commercial fertilizers, the burning, deleterious effects of which you may have experienced, and it will rectify the sourness of any and all soils.

An object lesson in favor of this phosphatic limestone is taught by riding along any turnpike macadamized with it and observing the rankness of the crops about fifty yards on either side of the pike, especially where the fields are worn and poor. This demonstrates that it is the dust blown from the roads over into the fields that makes the rank growth alongside the roads. It may be argued that the manure dropped on the pike produced the results; but if so small an amount of manure produced such wonderful results when mixed with the dust from the pike, what would be the result if you would mix all of your barn-yard manure with the powdered limestone?

Recently the writer made twelve tests or experiments with litmus paper. The first ten of these experiments were made with blue litmus paper and samples drawn from ten different fields, all of which have been under cultivation for many years and have had liberal yearly applications of acid fertilizers. The soils so tested are Alabama soils, and are decidedly acid, as shown by the bits of blue litmus turning red on coming in contact with them.

Everyone must know that it takes lime to neutralize the acids of acid soils; but comparatively few farmers ever take the trouble to find out whether or not their soils are acid, even after failing to get a catch of clover three or four years in succession. All clovers positively refuse to grow in acid soils. Inoculation will not do any good for bacteria cannot exist and operate in such soils. Sweeten the soil and nature will in most cases supply the bacteria.

Carbonate of lime enters into the frame of every plant and a lack of it will cause soft stems and flabby leaves. It improves the chemical, mechanical and biological condition of the soil. It flocculates very light, sandy soils, making them compact and capable of retaining moisture, while it prevents clayey soils from becoming pasty hard and full of cracks by causing them to crumble when dry.

Lime is the great carrier into plants of other elements which go there to form their organic compounds, during the elaboration of which, organic acids are created, any and all of which would poison and kill the plants were it not for the action of lime; so lime, in addition to its all-importance as a salifiable base, becomes the great carrier of all foods into plants where it is again of paramount importance as a fixer of oxalic fermentation, thus having the natural and distinct power to act where all other elements are useless.

It will correct sourness in any soil regardless of its origin, it will neutralize all acids that come into the soil through cultivation, through commercial fertilizers or green manurial crops. It will facilitate cultivation and produce a greater porosity and granulation of all soils and thereby lessen the bad effects of drought by reducing surface evaporation, will obviate excessive capillary rise of moisture which elevates the water-soluble foods above the zone of roots, provide better circulation of air in the soil and will cause rapid percolation of rain and thus reduce surface washing. It stimulates and increases nitrification and decomposes vegetable matter, extracting from it all plant foods and leaving humus to lighten the soil and retain its moisture. It enters into the composition of all plant life and therefore into all animal life, giving to animals its carbon combined with the carbon of the air to furnish them fat, and its lime to furnish them bone. It is the phosphatic-limestone that has made Tennessee and Kentucky horses the strength to excel in work and racing, and it is this same soil constituent that has given to the Jersey cow sufficient butter fat to lead the world in butter tests. It enables the clovers and grasses to grow, and without such crops what would the brothers of the hoe do toward profitable farming and meeting the responsibilities of life? It perpetuates and permits the use of commercial fertilizers which are becoming so absolutely essential to husbandry, as it obviates the evil effects of the acids these products contain, and makes all plant food available to the plant. Finally, it is a property designed by the Creator to act for and enter into all vegetable and animal life, and evil will be the reward to him who rejects it.

The Watermelon Sermon

Watermelon time is in full blast in Tennessee now. Ordinarily, the whites in the South cease to eat watermelons after the fifteenth of September, because they know that as soon as the cool nights begin every melon contains a thousand chills. But not so with the darkey. A chill rattles as harmlessly off the armour of his constitution as buckshot from the back of the Olympia. He can absorb miasma like a sponge, and, like it, grow fat as he absorbs. The negro, then, eats his melon until the November frosts kill the vines. Even then he carries the half-ripe melon into his cabin and often, on Christmas morning, an ice-cold watermelon is his first diet.

And a great treat it is. Did you never wander over the fields, way down South, after the cotton was all picked, and the November breezes came cool and ladened with that delicate, indescribably rare flavor the frost gives when it first nips the mellow-ripe muscadine? You have shouldered your gun and gone out after old Mollie Cotton Tail. It was cool and crisp when you went out, but toward noon it has grown hot again. Flushed and tired, you stop to rest by the big spring that flows from under the roots of the big oak near the cotton field. In the shadow of that oak, half hid in the frost-bitten weeds, you find a little striped watermelon--a guinea melon, as the darkies call it--a kind of a volunteer melon that grows in the cotton every year, the first seeds of which were brought by some Guinea negro, from the coast of Africa, when he first came over to servitude, with silver rings in his nose and ears. And though he failed to bring his idols and his household gods along with him, yet did he not forget the melon of his naked ancestors. Planting it as he hoed his first crop of cotton for a new master, it has never deserted him since, and so, year after year, it comes up amid the cotton, to remind him of the days it grew wild in a sunnier clime.

And there you find it this November morning. Boy like, you pounce on it with a shout and soon it is laid open, as red as your first love’s lips and as sweet; and so cold it seems to have been raised in the deep-delved cellars of all the centuries. I am sorry for the boy who has grown to be a man and never, in a November morning’s hunt after Old Mollie, had the exquisite sweetness of this satisfying surprise--the like of which is not equalled by the sweetness of any other surprise on earth. No--not even should he grow to be a man, and awake some morning to find himself famous and the father of twins!

Every darkey of any standing in Tennessee “gives a treat” at least once in his life. He will stint and economize for months to save money enough to invest in watermelons and tartaric acid (the acid makes the lemonade). Then, when the glorious day arrives, Nero, giving free entertainment to the citizens of Eternal Rome, is not in it with that darkey. Henceforth he can get anything in that community he wishes, from constable to presiding elder, while the widows of the church are his’n by a large majority!

I had heard that old Wash was going to run again for justice of the peace and the “deaconship of Zion” over in the coon district of Big Sandy, and that he was going to give his annual treat.

These had always passed off beautifully and ended in the unanimous election of the old man to both offices and anything else he wanted. I thought it was all over and entirely harmonious until he came in the other night, looking like Montejo’s flag-ship after Dewey’s ten-inch shell went through her, “a-rippin’ out her very innards”--as Old Wash himself described it--“from eend to eend.”

But when I saw the old man, creeping into my library, I was certain he was in the last stages of Asiatic cholera, and I rang the telephone hastily to get my family physician. But he feebly raised his hand, and beckoned me to desist.

“No, no, boss; he can’t do me no good--no good,” as he feebly sank into a chair. Then he whispered:

“Jes a drap, a leetle drap, on my tongue, boss--jes’ to let the old man shuffle off dis mortal coil wid a good taste in his mouth. It’s all I wants.”

Under the stimulant of that eternal beverage of moonlight and melody, he revived a little.

“What’s the matter with you? Anybody been giving you a hoodoo,” I asked.

“No, no, boss”--feebly--“I--I--I gin a treat at Big Sandy.”

“Well, you have given many a treat at Big Sandy. Why should this one make you look like a piney-wood coal-kiln after a cyclone had struck it?”

It took another dose from my side-board bottle to put enough life into the old man to make him take any interest in things. Then he brightened up and said:

“Dat’s jes’ hit--a man may go on doin’ de same trick year arter year, ontwel it looks lak he cud do it wid his eyes shet, an’ den at last, if he ain’t mighty keerful, hit’ll buck and fling ’im! De hardes’ luck, I take it, in dis wurl’, am when a man dun shuck de dice ob success ontwell dey seem to bob up at his word, only to play off on him an’ bust ’im es his palsied han’ shakes ’em fur de las’ time.”

His tears were flowing so freely and his remarks seemed so true and heartfelt, I did not have it in me to fail to brace him up with another pull from the side-board bottle. Then I saw he was ripe and reminiscent, and I lit my cigar, struck an easy attitude, and let him do the rest:

“On de Sundy befo’ de fust Mundy ob de full moon in September,” he went on, “cum off de ’lection fur ’ziden elder of Zion, an’ de next day am de day sot by law fur de ’lection of jestus ob de peace. So las’ Sat’d’y I gin a treat. I axed ebry nigger in de deestrict dar, an’ all de members of Zion, an’ Br’er Johnsing wus to preach de watermilion sermon.

“Ain’t nurver heurd ob de watermilion sermon? Hit’s de sermon preached at de feast ob de watermilion jes’ befo’ de new moon in September, an’ it am one ob de doctrines ob Zion to kinder take de place ob de feast ob de Passober ’mong de Jews--only in dis case we don’t pass ober nuffin’, ’specially de watermilions. Now, hit tain’t eb’ry nigger kin preach de watermilion sermon. Hit takes a mighty juicy nigger to do hit, yallar with dark stripes, juicy at de core, full of tears an’ sweet penitence an’ easily laid open by the blade of grace, an’ brudder Johnsing am de slickest one I eber seed at it.

“Now, dat wus my time to git in my fine Italyun han’, an’ so I gin it out that hit wus to be my treat, an’ I axed all de voters ob de deestrick an’ all de members ob Zion ter be on han’ fur de revival ob de speerit an’ de refreshment ob de flesh.