Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 June 1874 — Deep or Shallow Culture. [ARTICLE]

Deep or Shallow Culture.

Discussions continually go on in agricultural quarters as to whetbersoil should be deeply stirred or plowed up shallow. The contestants on each side bring facts and figures to Bustain them: - What are we to say of these apparent contradictions ? If one man says that he had land shallow-piowed which yielded but ten bushels of wheat per acre, and after turning it up deeply it brought twenty, are we to say this is all nonsense—he did not get the twenty ? Or if a man tells us that he does not plow at all, but stirs up the ground with a drag-harrow, and that still he gets as good crops as he ever had by the deepest soilstirring, are we to tell the man we do not believe him ? Yet this is practically the condition~“oi things today. The advocates of each practice entrench themselves on their separate facts and experiences, and the observations of others on the other side have no weight with them at all. For our part we take pleasure always ' in listening to the experience of those who talk to us in opposition to our own views. We learn more in this way than in any other whatever. We (men find—not that our own experience goes for nothing—but that we have overlooked some agent in success which ought to have been taken into account. In fact, it is just here that so much error comes in and leads to interminable discussion, when really people occupy the same ground. For the effects we see produced in our own every day operations are never the result of ODe cause, but of several acting in harmony together. For instance, seed will not grow without there be some moisture in the soil; but it would be absurd to argue the merit of different systems of seed-sowing from the moisture point alone. We must consider light, and heat and air, and nutrition, and several other things alto- § ether. Thus it is with this question of eep plowing. One thing is certain, that if we have a soil which dries out very soon, and becomes hard on the surface, plants growing here will fail very soon in a dry season. The deeply-loosened soil, under these circumstances, permits of moisture coming up from below, and thus the plant is enabled to keep on, in even the worst seasons growing to maturity. But if the situation be lovy, or the season wet, when water is an injury instead of p benefit, then the deeper the soil the worse for the crop; because in such a soil and situation the water is encouraged to remain there instead of passing away over the surface to the nearest ditch. The question, then, is removed from one of deep soil to an overplus of water; and we mistake the whole point when we think that deep culture is alone involved. We have seen illustrations of this over and over again. We knevf a friend, some years ago, who had a small piece of garden ground, wherein he grew fruits and vegetables for his family in his spare time, and sold what he did not need to provision stores close by. One season he trenched, as it is called, a piece ol ground—that is, he loosened it up two iee't deep T _and about the end of July he planted bush beans thereon. The whole of the season that followed was excessively dry, but his beans grew, as he said, like wildfire, and the quantity of soft, brittle “ snapshorts” that he obtained from a comparatively short piece of ground was prodigious, and the profits no less wonderful. He thought he had found the secret of 'growing beans. He had that year an abundance, and of very superior quality, when his neighbors had none; and why could he not always do the same? He extended the area of his trenched bean ground the next season; but that season proved a, wet ohe, and on that same ground his beans did not do at all. The soil was brick earth at the depth of a foot or so, and the water of course came from the surrounding hard earth to the looser subsoiled portion, till it was a little sea of water, in which roots of course could not thrive. We may learn from this that there is nothing in either deep or shallow plowing in itself. It is only as other questions are involved with it that any practical argumeht can be turned out of it. It is one of those questions in which common sense must play ft conspicuous part. — Forney's Weekly Press. Corn Starch Cake.—Sugar one and one-half teacnpfnl; flour, one and one-half teacupful; butter, one-half teacupful; com starch, one-halfteacupful;milk, onehalf teacnpfnl; six eggs, whites only-, baking powder, one teaspoonful. Flavor to ta*te v Sixteen residents of the town of Marlboro, Mass., have sworn to enforce the laws regarding the killing of birds.