ured seven acres, or half
an acre to each creature stabled. The result is proof that one cow
discharges urine sufficient in five months to manure abundantly half an
acre of land. Save the solid manure equally well, and a cow will make
manure enough, in five or six months, to increase a crop sufficiently to
pay for herself. It is certainly safe to say, that a careful man can
make the manure of a cow pay for her body every year. Is not this an
important branch of farming operations? Few pay sufficient attention to
it. Fowls should roost where their droppings may be mixed with common
garden soil or loam. The manure from each fowl, carefully saved and
judiciously applied, will pay for its body twice a year. The hogstye may
be very productive of manure, one fourth better than that from the
stable. Connected with your hogpen, have a yard fifteen feet square for
every five hogs; let that yard have no floor. Throw the straw out of
their sleeping-room frequently to make room for new; throw into the
yard, also, all sorts of weeds, refuse vegetables, corn-husks, peapods,
&c.; also the dirt that will naturally accumulate in the backyard of a
dwelling, including sawdust, fine chips, cleanings of cellars, scrapings
of ditches, and occasionally a load of loam, muck, or clay--and six
loads of manure to each hog may be made, that will prove far better than
any stable manure; it has been known to produce fifty bushels of corn to
the acre, when stable-manure produced but forty bushels. Old wood,
brush, and chips, should never be allowed to remain on uncultivated,
useless land. Wood throws out the same amount of heat in decaying as it
does when consumed as fuel. The action of that heat on the soil is
highly beneficial, retaining it long in a mellow state: hence, all wood,
too old to be of value for any other purpose, should be put in heaps,
covered up till decomposed, and then applied to the soil, as other
manures. For potatoes or vines, but especially melons, it is preferable
to any other manure. Nothing is so good for muskmelons as old chips
from the woodyard. Leaves of fruit and forest trees are also very good;
blood and offal of animals, hair, hoofs, bones, horns, refuse feathers,
woollen rags, mud from sewers, rivers, roads, swamps, or ponds, turf,
ashes, old brine, soapsuds, all kinds of fish, oyster and clam
shells--all are valuable, and no part of them should ever be thrown away
or wasted; they are all good in compost heaps, or appli