VEGETABLE LIFE

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21180, 29 October 1938, Page 15

VEGETABLE LIFE

PRODUCTIVE POWERS OF SOILS The productive powers of Nature appear never to diminish; the process goes on year after year with energy, and brings forth an increase of vegetable matter to be again decomposed and returned to the soil. No loss is sustained by the decomposing of vegetable or animal matter; all is reduced to the first elements of plants which give fresh energy to vegetation by again entering into vegetable compositions. The decay of one crop becomes the nourishment of the next. When Nature is left to herself, the accumulation of decomposing vegetable matter on the surface becomes great; and if the soil is not possessed of the property of hastening their decay, the vegetable matter is merely • increased on the soil, without adding to its productive powers.

On a careful examination it will be found, states an overseas authority, that the production of vegetables never exhausts any soil; the yearly growth of grass with decay, produced by them, adds yearly to its productiveness. Even a plentiful crop of weeds is converted into animal food for man, and the excrement of the stock being left on the soil forms a rich decomposing animal manure, which gives to the soil increased energy to reproduce an increase of vegetable food for an additional quantity of stock.

A certain degree of heat, the influence of the atmosphere and water, are necessary to carry on the decomposition of-animal and vegetable matter in the soil. The best constituted soil, therefore, has the power of imbibing, retaining and giving up to plants a proper degree of heat, air and moisture. When the atmosphere is warm, moist and sultry, vegetable life is in the greatest vigour, which would indicate these to be necessary to vegetable life, if not the very principles on which it depends. Soil should not only have an affinity for the moisture of the atmosphere, but it should also have the property of readily transmitting it to the plants which grow in it. Tire soil, therefore, which is best adapted for retaining and transmitting in all circumstances of wet and dry weather the necessary quantity of moisture to growing plants may be reckoned the best and most productive.