MISCELLANEOUS NOTES.

Auckland Star, Volume XXVIII, Issue 276, 27 November 1897, Page 3 (Supplement)

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES.

Fresh and Stale Manure. —Manure is most valuable when it is first voided. It never gains in lime, potash, phosphoric acid or nitrogen by being preserved, but as usually kept there is quite a loss of these elements by, leaching. Carefully composting the manure makes it finer and more quickly available as plant food, especially if much coarse stuff is mixed with it, but for all field crops the sooner manure is put \ipon the land the more good is received from it. So true is this that progressive farmers in America cart manure right out on the snow in winter,provided the land does not wash, while during the rest of the year it is daily spread on the land desired to be fed.

The Silent Subsoiler. —There are some silent subsoilers (remarks an American writer) that do their work with ease, and, in their way, as effectually as any team or plough ever hitched .though on some lands the use of a subsoil plough is essential to the best beginning of such work.. The clover plant is rightly famed as one of these, and alfalfa (lucerne) is its superior. Its roots work Sunday as well as Saturday; night and day; they strike five, ten, fifteen, twenty feet deep, making innumerable perforations, while storing up nitrogen, and when these roots decay they leave not only a generous crop, but millionsof openings into which the air and rains of heaven find their way and help to constitute an unfailing reservoir of wealth iipon which the husbandman can draw with little fear of protest or overdraft.

Sheep return to the soil, in manure, the largest percentage of the manurial value of the food consumed of any other animal. Experiments in Germany resulted in showing that 95 per cent, of all the manurial elements of the food consumed was returned in their manure, solid and liquid.