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Air-slacked lime is also useful to the peach in small quantities; and so, no doubt, would be a little salt from time to time. Bone-meal is highly recommended. Like other fruit-trees, the peach does not thrive on low, wet ground, and the fruit-buds are much more apt to be winter-killed in such localities. A light, warm soil is regarded as the most favorable.
When more manure is required to be added say bone-meal it is scattered on the soil in the pit, or the top soil in it is scraped off and the manure scattered and then covered up. I now propose to consider our manurial resources in detail, and shall begin with the first stay of all agriculture, farmyard manure, as to the value of which for coffee I have never met with any difference of opinion.
With such a compost as I have suggested, bone-meal or fish-manure in small quantity might be mixed, and we should then have a very good substitute for all the chemical and physical advantages to be derived from the very best kind of farmyard manure.
This, of course, has in it much vegetable matter in various stages of decay, and a mixture of it with a small quantity of bone-meal would form a manure superior, as I shall afterwards show when I come to treat of top soil, to farmyard manure chemically, and superior to it from a physical point of view.
And, if neither of the two former sources are available, then 3 cwt. of bone-meal and 2 cwt. of white castor cakes would be a reasonable application.
The pits for vacancy plants should be dug shortly after the monsoon, and filled in soon after being dug, when the soil is quite dry, with a mixture of jungle top soil, bone-meal, and ordinary soil, or old, well dried cattle manure mixed with some fine bone-meal and ordinary soil.
There is a common idea, which I myself once shared, that it is always best to have your nursery on new land, but this is really not at all necessary if you renew your land by carting on to it top soil from the jungle, or even a mixture of any fresh soil that has not been trampled upon, and which has been mixed with cattle manure and some bone-meal.
Now as regards the chemical aspect of the manurial question, if we assume, as we have every reason to do from the small quantity of potash required, and its supply from decomposing stones in the land, that the potash does not require to be taken into account, we shall find that our nitrogen and phosphoric acid can be far more cheaply supplied by fish, or by a mixture of bone-meal and oil-cake than by farmyard manure, and should it be found that potash does require to be added, we could obtain it more cheaply from ashes or kainit.
Continued vigor is better maintained by wood-ashes perhaps than by any other fertilizer, after the soil is once deepened and enriched, and it may be regarded as one of the very best tonics for the strawberry plant. Bone-meal is almost equally good. Guano and kindred fertilizers are too stimulating, and have not the staying qualities required.
It's been my experience, though, that sometimes when you can't kick a man out of the back door without a row, you can get him to walk out the front way voluntarily. So when I get stuck with a fellow that, for some reason, it isn't desirable to fire, I generally promote him and raise his pay. Some of these weak sisters I make the assistant boss of the machine-shop and some of the bone-meal mill.
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