HOLDING AND INCREASING THE FERTILITY OF THE SOIL
There is no one thing that the gardener so needs to keep always in
mind of more importance than that the soil needs additional fertility;
it does not matter how good it may have been originally or how good
it was last year; this year it must have returned to it the food that
was taken from it last year by the crop that was grown upon it. Any
soil that is not virgin soil—soil that has never been used, and that
sort of soil is not available in towns and villages if, indeed, it is
anywhere in an old, settled country like ours—must have returned to
it, year after year, an equivalent of the fertility extracted from
it in growing the previous season's crop. It may be that the loss of
many seasons must be made good, it may be that the soil was originally
deficient in many, or only one, of the elements that make fertility;
probably it will lack that most important element of productive
soil—humus. Humus, be it understood, is that element in the soil
that causes it to appear dark. What it really consists of is decayed
vegetable matter and it is always found forming the top soil of virgin,
or uncultivated land. It is present in large amounts in woodlands where
the falling leaves and surface growth lie on the ground, year after
year, and decay and form what is technically known as leaf mould. We
know how admirably it is adapted to the growing of house plants, and
its value is often erroneously attributed to the plant food it is
supposed to contain, but its great value is not so much in its food
content as its influence on the soil with which it is combined; by its
presence it makes the soil retentive of moisture and this moisture in
turn unlocks the chemical elements of the soil so that they become
available for food. Soils that are deficient of humus, though otherwise
fertile, dry out so badly in summer that unless artificially watered,
they will produce little, and even where a sufficient water supply
is available the result will fall far short of what would have been
produced were the supply of humus sufficient.
Fortunately there are ways of restoring the humus to worn out soils and
on the small area of the kitchen garden the process presents little if
any difficulty. The most readily available source of humus is found
in a liberal application of barnyard manure; this for the quickest
and most satisfactory results should be well rotted, but not fired or
leached—that is, it should have been saved in such a way that the rain
has not washed the fertility out of it in the form of liquid manure,
or lack of moisture caused it to heat and burn. The most satisfactory
method of handling manure is under shelter in a cement bottom pit with
a depression or well for the liquid contents to drain into; this is
seldom available in the town or city garden, but an enclosed pen for
the manure, where it can be kept in a compact pile and where water can
be turned on often enough to prevent firing, answers very well; better
still is it to draw the manure on the land as it is produced; this,
too, is seldom practicable in the small garden, but a heavy dressing
of manure can always be applied in the fall, spread evenly and allowed
to lie and rot over winter and be turned under in the spring while it
is wet. The rapidity of decay, and hence the availability of the plant
food it contains of any vegetable matter turned under in a garden is
greatly increased if it is turned under wet, dry material turned under
rots very slowly and may be a detriment rather than a help to the crops
that are grown over it that season. If a plant sends its roots down
into a mass of dry leaves, straw or other material it has no chance to
gain either moisture or nourishment and must exist on what little its
surface roots can extract from the top layer of soil.
In spading manure into a small strip of land or a bed I usually allow
at least one large wheelbarrow to a square yard and this proportion
should be observed for the whole garden. Practically about twenty tons
of manure per acre will be required for good results, market gardeners
often use far more, or a large, two horse load for a strip of land
fifty feet square. If the land is light and sandy the manure should
be well rotted but on clay or heavy tenacious soil fresh manure gives
better results as it breaks apart the particles of the soil, by the
expansion caused by heating, and adds sand, which is also a mechanical
disintegrant, permanent in effect.
There is another way in which humus can be immediately supplied and
that is by applications of woods earth or marsh earth-muck, directly
to the soil. Where a supply of either form of humus is available it
pays well to employ it. For a number of years I made a practice of
keeping track of available sources of humus, noting as I drove about
the country where new land was being broken up and especially where
marsh land was being ditched and drained; then in the spring I would
engage the owner to haul me as many loads as I required, but as the
time passed it became necessary to go farther and farther afield until
the cost of hauling became prohibitive.
There has been considerable discussion of late in agricultural papers
as to the value of raw muck when applied to the land. Muck in its
unsubdued state is more of a fuel-peat than a fertilizer; it needs to
be subdued by lying out over winter so that the frost may disintegrate
it and make it available for plant food, but I have found that it may
be made immediately available in its raw state by burying or covering
it with a layer of soil to exclude the air and retain moisture; in
this form it gradually changes to humus and plants grown in it do
exceedingly well. Among interesting experiments conducted to test its
use was this conclusive one: deep holes were dug in beds that were to
be planted to bedding plants—cannas, salvias and the like; these holes
were filled with the raw muck and covered with the soil of the garden
and into this the plants were set and the usual culture followed;
the results were surprising; salvias, that ordinarily made a growth
of about thirty inches reached the astonishing height of nearly five
feet and were a mass of blooms; still more astonishing results were
discovered in clearing the beds in the fall when it was found that the
muck had practically disappeared, the plants having literally consumed
it. Left on the surface of the soil the muck would have dried into a
hard, intractable mass, fit only for fuel.
If one had a supply of raw muck available and wished to apply it to
the garden it could be handled by following the plough and shovelling
the muck into the open furrow; the next furrow turned would cover it.
It would be of much benefit and would be turned to the surface again
in the following spring ploughing. This should not be expected to take
the place of barnyard manure, as it would lack some elements contained
in that but it could be combined with such commercial fertilizers as
the condition of the soil might suggest—lime, for instance, might be
indicated by the sourness of the soil. If sorrel is plentiful on the
ground it is a pretty good indication that lime is in order, but one
need not depend upon its presence for data as these may be quickly
attained by the use of blue litmus paper which may be obtained of any
druggist. Its use is simple; if the soil is very wet, simply pressing a
strip of litmus paper down into it and examining it in an hour's time
will indicate, according as it retains its color or turns pink—the
acid reaction—the presence of acidity in the soil, or a cupful of the
soil may be mixed with water to a thin paste and the paper inserted
with the same diagnosis.
Lime is more in the form of a stimulant or indirect fertilizer than
a real plant-food; it is in a medical sense an alterative, changing
the nature of the soil. It not only sweetens, but mechanically, it
binds loose soil, but flocculates or opens up tenacious clayey soils,
affording freer passage of air and water and lessening the tendency
to wash. It should be applied, on light, sandy soils at the rate of
about five hundred pounds per acre or twenty-five pounds to every
fifty square feet of garden plot; ten times this amount can be used
on a heavy clay soil, but liming of the soil is not necessary every
year, about once in five being desirable, so that considered as an
expense it is nearly negligible. Slaked lime is best, and wood ashes,
which contain about thirty-four per cent. of lime, are valuable aids
in building up the fertility of the soil. They should not, however,
be mixed with the manure or applied at the same time as they tend
to release the ammonia contained in the manure and as ammonia spells
nitrate—the most costly of all our commercial fertilizers—the ashes
should rather be broadcasted over the ground after the manure is turned
in and then mixed with the soil by dragging and harrowing.
There are fourteen different chemical elements that are necessary for
plant growth—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur,
chlorine, silicon, calcium, iron, potassium, sodium, magnesium and
manganese; the first four are derived directly or indirectly from
the air, the remainder from the soil. Virgin soil contains all these
soil-derived elements in available form and in sufficient quantities
for plant growth, and it has the power to absorb the elements which
are derived from the air, but our short sighted methods of soil
cultivation, or robbery, deplete the soil of some of its elements
faster than it can convert them into available food for the plants.
Liberal applications of manure replace the loss more quickly and
economically than any other treatment and if this is supplemented with
such chemical elements as the soil may seem to be particularly in need
of the fertility of the soil will be assured.
The most economical and practical treatment of the soil would be
through the analysis of the soil by a soil chemist; this can readily be
done by sending a sample of the soil to your state agricultural college
which will analyze and advise as to its requirements, or a sample can
be given to your county agent who will attend to it and advise you. In
this way one works intelligently and wastes neither time nor money in
experiments with no definite aim.
Not all of the fourteen different chemical elements required for plant
food need to be artificially supplied; there are but three important
elements which we need to consider in this connection—nitrogen,
phosphoric acid and potash and only one of these may be lacking; a
soil analysis will indicate which one. Nitrogen is the most expensive
of the three; it is available, commercially, in three forms—organic
nitrogen, ammonia and nitrates. The organic nitrogen is commonly and
most economically derived from tankage and dried blood—by-products
of slaughter-houses—dried fish, and refuse from fish canneries and
cottonseed meal; they contain, approximately—in dried blood, ten to
fifteen per cent.; tankage, seven to nine; dried fish, seven to eight;
cottonseed meal, six to seven per cent. These decay rapidly when added
to the soil and are particularly valuable when applied to light soils,
where nitrates or ammonia leach too rapidly and should not be applied
until the crops are up and growing. They make available during their
processes of fermentation the phosphoric acid and potash already
present in the soil. Sulphate of ammonia, containing about twenty
per cent. of nitrogen is a valuable chemical form in which to secure
nitrogen as it does not leach from the soil as nitrate of soda does and
so can be made available by the plant without loss.
Phosphoric acid is found commercially in the form of superphosphates;
these come from phosphate rocks and are first ground, then treated
with sulphuric acid. Bone is rich in phosphoric acid and is a very
excellent form in which to supply this element to the garden, as it is
obtained in several forms—raw bone, coarsely ground, fine ground and
bone meal. One may by applying two or more grades secure the fertility
of the garden for several years as raw bone decays slowly and will
give results for a period of four years while bone meal is immediately
available. Potash is most economically supplied by applications of
wood ashes. But it must be borne in mind that the use of commercial
fertilizers is not intended to replace that of barnyard manure, but
rather to supplement it until the soil has regained what it has lost
by poor management. Commercial fertilizers will of themselves produce
a crop, but it is at the expense of the after-fertility of the land,
just as the application of the whip will spur a jaded horse to one
more final effort. Liberal applications of manure, leaf mould or
muck and bone meal will bring any land that has soil at all, up to a
satisfactory condition of fertility in a very few years.
Nor is it necessary to go far afield for the humus for so small a piece
of land as a kitchen garden for the material for the finest kind of
mould lies right at hand in every bit of outdoors. What nature does
in a field and woods she will do in one's dooryard if one will only
watch her methods and co-operate with her. In the woods, for instance,
she shakes down the ripe leaves from the trees, cuts with frost and
age the undergrowth and sends the wind to drift them into piles where
she waters and compacts them until in process of time they lose their
identity as leaves and plants and become a fine, black mould, fine
and warm to the touch and blended with a clean, sharp, white sand, or
silicate. To imitate her methods successfully we have only to collect
the dead leaves in the fall instead of wastefully burning them, pile
them in a heap in some convenient place; surround them with a frame
to keep them from being distributed about the premises by fowls or
wind and to the nucleus thus formed add any waste matter—animal or
vegetable—that will decay, about the place—the weeds from the garden,
the wastings from the house and laundry. It is amazing, once one has
started to conserve fertility, how much one can find to add to this
compost heap; I recall that one spring, from a well-tended compost
heap and one horse stable, I had hauled on to the garden ten large,
two-horse loads of fertilizer, and put the garden in excellent shape,
and not only this,—it had kept the premises tidy as nothing else would
have done. The gatherings of the summer and fall will, by spring, have
rotted down into available form and the action of the soil, sun and
rain will complete the process.
The growing of pet stock on a place adds so greatly to the upkeep
of the land that it constitutes an object in itself. Poultry is an
abundant source of manure which may be composted in barrels with
alternate layers of soil, of lime or of any absorbent material or may
be piled on the compost heap and mixed with the vegetable matter.
To this will be added the litter from the hen house floors which is
rich in droppings and full of earth and ground up leaves and straw.
But another source of manure, not enough considered, is found in the
droppings from the rabbit hutches. If one raises Belgian hares, as
every one who wishes to conserve meat, should, one will find that,
in addition to a supply of delicious meat, one has also produced a
valuable garden asset in the form of a highly concentrated manure; one
will also find that one has practically done away with all waste from
the garden as the hares will have consumed all the unusable parts of
the vegetables—all such early things that run to seed, as lettuce,
endive, swiss chard and the like. A large part of the weeds incident
to a garden will also be consumed if pulled and offered them, thus
minimizing the weed growth for the coming year, as every weed consumed
means just so many less to appear the following year. It will be many
years before the lesson of the home garden so insistently brought
before us by the war will be lost, but we shall not have gained the
full measure of its lesson if we do not realize that the critical
shortage of meat is not up to the farmer and stockman altogether, but
is a matter for each individual householder to adjust by producing, as
far as his environment will permit, his own meat supply, by raising
chickens and hares if only room for small stock is available, and pork
if it is possible to find room and feed for a pig—and a pig does not
require a great amount of room—a six by eight pen will do and a
paddock, with grass and fresh water, which need not be more than two
rods square, and reasonable attention to sanitation will render him a
contented and unobjectionable member of the family and a very savory
and profitable member, too, come butchering time. These three things
should go hand in hand;—A garden to produce vegetables for the family;
live stock to consume the waste from the garden and live stock to
furnish fertility for the garden; these three spell fertility for the
soil and prosperity for the family.
Where the supply of manure is limited so that the entire garden area
cannot be covered, quite as good returns may be secured by following
the plough with a load of any manure available, and dropping it in
the furrow that will correspond with the planting row—if for corn,
every three feet of furrows, setting stakes to indicate the fertilised
strips. In a small garden fertiliser may be trundled along in a
wheelbarrow and shovelled in with fork or spade. This is an excellent
plan in preparing ground for peas.