rge Town Oats. The
objects, and design of this experiment, was to ascertn. 3 things--1st.
which of these two kinds of Oats were best the George Town (which was a
good kind of the common Oats)--2d. whether two or four bushels to the
Acre was best--and 3d. the difference between ground dunged at the Rate
of 5 load or 200 bushels to the Acre and ground undunged."

This experiment is typical of a great many others and it resulted, of
course, in better yields on the manured ground and showed that two
bushels of seed were preferable to four. But if he ever set down the
result of the experiment as regards the varieties, the passage has
escaped me.

While at Fredericksburg this year visiting his mother and his sister
Betty Lewis he learned of an interesting method of raising potatoes
under straw and wrote down the details in his diary. A little later when
attending the Federal Convention he kept his eyes and ears open for
agricultural information. He learned how the Pennsylvanians cultivated
buckwheat and visited the farm of a certain Jones, who was getting good
results from the use of plaster of Paris. With his usual interest in
labor-saving machinery he inspected at Benjamin Franklin's a sort of
ironing machine called a mangle, "well calculated," he thought, "for
Table cloths & such articles as have not pleats & irregular foldings &
would be very useful in large families."

This year he had in wheat seven hundred acres, in grass five hundred
eighty acres, in oats four hundred acres, in corn seven hundred acres,
with several hundred more in buckwheat, barley, potatoes, peas, beans
and turnips.

In 1788 he raised one thousand eighty-eight bushels of potatoes on one
plantation, but they were not dug till December and in consequence some
were badly injured by the frost. An experiment that year was one of
transplanting carrots between rows of corn and it was not successful.

He worked hard in these years, but, as many another industrious farmer
has discovered, he found that he could do little unless nature smiled
and fickle nature persisted in frowning. In 1785 the rain seemed to
forget how to fall, and in 1786 how to stop falling. Some crops failed
or were very short and soon he was so hard up that he was anxious to
sell some lands or negroes to meet debts coming due. In February, 1786,
in sending fifteen guineas to his mother, he wrote:

"I have now demands upon me for more than L500, three hundred and forty
odd of which