ss than half as
much work, an acreage at least equal to that in cotton, and to devote the
remaining energy to sweet potatoes, peanuts, cow peas and small grain. In
1820 the usual crop in middle Georgia for each full hand was reported at
six acres of cotton and eight of corn;[3] but in the following decades
during which mules were advantageously substituted for horses and oxen,
and the implements of tillage were improved and the harvesters grew more
expert, the annual stint was increased to ten acres in cotton and ten in
corn.

[Footnote 3: _The American Farmer_ (Baltimore), II, 359.]

At the Christmas holiday when the old year's harvest was nearly or quite
completed, well managed plantations had their preliminaries for the new
crop already in progress. The winter months were devoted to burning
canebrakes, clearing underbrush and rolling logs in the new grounds,
splitting rails and mending fences, cleaning ditches, spreading manure,
knocking down the old cotton and corn stalks, and breaking the soil of the
fields to be planted. Some planters broke the fields completely each year
and then laid off new rows. Others merely "listed" the fields by first
running a furrow with a shovel plow where each cotton or corn row was to be
and filling it with a single furrow of a turn plow from either side; then
when planting time approached they would break out the remaining balks with
plows, turning the soil to the lists and broadening them into rounded plant
beds. This latter plan was advocated as giving a firm seed bed while making
the field clean of all grass at the planting. The spacing of the cotton
rows varied from three to five feet according to the richness of the soil.
The policy was to put them at such distance that the plants when full grown
would lightly interlace their branches across the middles.

In March the corn fields were commonly planted, not so much because this
forehandedness was better for the crop as for the sake of freeing the
choicer month of April for the more important planting of cotton. In this
operation a narrow plow lightly opened the crests of the beds; cotton seed
were drilled somewhat thickly therein; and a shallow covering of earth was
given by means of a concave board on a plow stock, or by a harrow, a roller
or a small shallow plow.

Within two or three weeks, as soon as the young plants had put forth three
or four leaves, thinning and cultivation was begun. Hoe hands, under
orders to chop caref