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The haul altogether amounted to eighteen loads besides a hundred bags of vilely smelling fertilizers. Agents for every kind of phosphates crowded around me, descanting on the needs of the old land, until I began to comprehend what the owner meant by "keeping it up." With Gail Hamilton, I had supposed the entire land of this earth to be pretty much the same age until I adopted the "abandoned."
Again, the blight is always most persistent under the shade of trees or tall hedges, or where the bine is over luxuriant, when owing to the exclusion of light and air the plant is unable to elaborate its natural safeguard. Fertilizers not well balanced as to their constituents, and containing an excess of nitrogen, act as stimulants without supplying the minerals necessary for perfect health.
In the first instance, fertilizers should be applied in moderation to the surface, and rains and the cultivation of the growing crops depended upon to carry the richness downward to the roots.
They maintained schools, bookstores, and libraries: co-operative stores; hospitals and banks. They provided the peasants with cheap credit, good seeds, fertilizers, agricultural implements, and so forth. In many cases they provided for free medical aid to the peasants. In some instances they published newspapers and magazines.
These wonderful fertilizers are a blessed boon in the time of "crop failures," for then the same crop can be grown anew from the seed and hurried to maturity before the close of the season. The curse of the vegetable worms has been reduced to a minimum on this world of Ploid.
There is a broad hilling up, so as to have a slope inward toward the plants, as well as away from them. This method, with the deep, loosened soil beneath the plants, secures against drought, while the decayed fertilizers give a strong and immediate growth. Of course we have to fight the potato, or Colorado, beetle during the growing season.
The facts are that while some profit can be secured from the use of high-priced mixed commercial fertilizers for cotton with lint at 10 cents a pound, they scarcely pay their cost when used for corn, even at Georgia prices. Working Mind and Muscle
The development of other methods of producing nitrates will probably render this plant less important for that purpose than formerly. But we have it, and I am told it still provides a practical method of making nitrates for national defense and farm fertilizers.
Such ground is termed "grateful," and it is not the kind of gratitude which has been defined as "a lively appreciation of favors to come," which is true of some other soils. This ideal land remembers past favors; it retains the fertilizers with which it has been enriched, and returns them in the form of good crops until the gift is exhausted; therefore it is a thrifty as well as a grateful soil.
It would be folly to try to depend upon lime as a sole source of soil fertility. On the other hand, we have learned very definitely within the last quarter of a century that it is foolish to depend upon commercial fertilizers and tillage and good seeds for full production of most crops from great areas of our farming country that have a marked lime deficiency.
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