Jasper Republican, Volume 1, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 April 1875 — Plant the Trees. [ARTICLE]

Plant the Trees.

Wb have often urged. upon our raeA era, especially in the country, more attention to tree culture. We have from amount of timber lands remaining in tbis country, and of the rapid rate at which they are disappearing from year to year. As an economical question, that ot the timber supply bids fair, at no distant day, to become one of the most important as well as the most serious with which we shall have to contend. The subject may be hackneyed enough, for it is repeatedly presented through the columns of almost every journal in the land; still, as what is everybody’s business always seems to be nobody’s in particular, it does not seem to attract that attention at the hands of those who own the acres and cultivate them which it so eminently deserves. People everywhere are almost criminal in their neglect of this legitimate branch of farm industry and production. There b no excuse whatever for such procrastination. Forest trees can be rabed from the seed quite as easily as com or potatoes; and they are sold by moat of our enterprising nurserymen by the thousands and tens of thousands for rates which seem merely nominal It costs much less for a thousand yearling trees of some of the useful standard varieties—excellent for shade and foel both—than it does for a 1,000 very bad cigars! A farm which b encircled with a double row of these cheap trees will in five years command several dollars per acre more than the adjoining domain of Mr. Sloth ful who never gives the subject a thought. Considering the value of growing trees, immediately and remotely, *nd the ease with which they can be secured, it is one of the things at which we never cease wondering, that there b not a perfect mania among the farmers for planting them. We advert to the subject at thb time for two reasons: 1, because the time for planting them is at hand, and we wish to give our readers an emphatic hint in a short article which they will not tire of reading; and 2, to call attention to one direction in which they afford protection. We have just passed through a hard winter, during which the winds have raged with more than wonted fierceness. One consequence of these winds, on thousands of farms throughout the West and North west, has been the blowing away of immense quantities of the rich top soil. In many places the great snowdrifts which have been melting away during these past two weeks have been coated deep with fine black dirt from the plowed fields. We miss this but little now, because of the immense fertility of the soil; but it is a large and most unprofitable drain upon any man’s farm, and in time it will produce sterility. It is almost as bad for a field which b kept in tillage year after year, as many of ours in the West are, as for a man to have tubercles on his lungs. He may manage to go about hb business for a few yean, but the constant waste will take him under sooner or later. But this waste of the soil from these bitter winter winds may be measurably arrested by judiciously planting belts of timber on the lines from which they generally come. Another benefit: If your neighbor b too lazy to do anything of the kind it will pay you to plan trees so as to catch the soil which h blown from his fields, as the railroad snow-fences catch the snow.

To make this subject as practical as possible we advise our readers out on the prairie farms West and Northwest to send a postal-card to their nearest nurseryman and ask for hie catalogues, and they can see for themselves that it would be but the merest bagatelle to purchase a thousand trees, and they know without our telling them that it is scarcely more work to plant and cultivate them than it is as many hills of potatoes or corn. Their value is so great that we need not urge other reasons why they should be planted largely. We trust that no rural reader will let the present spring go by without doing his own part in this most necessary and profitable work.— Chicago Inter-Ocean.