CHAPTER VI HOLDING AND INCREASING THE FERTILITY

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;65 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 available66 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 it67 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 load68 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 late69 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 in70 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 strip71 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, be72 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 other73 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 is74 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 supply75 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 of76 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,77 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 delicious78 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 require79 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.