LIQUID MANURES--AN ILLUSTRATION.
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 mean time, 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
ruta-bagas 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 hedge-rows; his house had been completely renovated;
he had built a large barn and cattle-sheds, while his garden was
immeasurably better than mine. Every thing 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 pig-pen
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.