e years in
castor beans has borne great crops. This has been attributed to the
completeness and the long time the crop shades the ground, and also to
the long tap root of the plant, which makes it a crop of all others,
suited to dry soils, and hot climate. After preparing the land as for
corn, it should be laid off so the plants will stand, for your latitude,
five feet each way. Three or four seeds are usually planted, but when
the beans are five to six inches high, and out of the way of cut-worms,
they are thinned to one. The cultivation is after the manner of Indian
corn, and the planting should be at the same time. The beans for your
latitude will begin to ripen late in July, and continue to the end of
the season, when the plants are killed by severe frosts, light frosts
doing scarcely any damage. In harvesting, a spot of hard ground is
prepared and the pods as gathered are thrown on the ground and dried out
in the sun. And here is where the trouble with making a successful and
profitable crop comes in. The beans must be kept in the dry from the
time of gathering the pods--one soaking rain always seriously damaging,
and frequently destroying the merchantable value of so much of the
harvest as happens to be on the ground. As in the case of broom corn,
the hot, dry, and protracted late summer and fall months of that State,
afford the Kansas farmer something like a monopoly of the castor bean
crop. It is nevertheless giving place to corn and wheat.

LETTER FROM CHAMPAIGN.

The snow continues to accumulate, the last having fallen before midnight
the 11th. There were only about two inches, but it is drifting this
morning, for all it is worth, before a gale from the West. The first and
second snows stay where they were put at first, but the subsequent ones
are in drifts or scattered all abroad, in the many snows and the
excellence of the sleighing, this winter resembles '78-'79, but there is
more snow and the temperature is very much more severe. I suppose there
is well-nigh eighteen inches now on the ground, something quite unusual
in this latitude. Let us hope it will stay sometime longer yet, and save
the fall wheat.

The intensely cold weather of last week was rough on stock of all kinds
and in all conditions, and particularly hard on that portion having
short rations. But I have seen many worse storms and much harder weather
for stock; none however in which the fruits, small or large, suffered
worse. At lea