Identifier: harpersnew72various (find matches)
Title: Harper's New Monthly Magazine Volume 34 December 1886 to May 1887
Year: 1887 (1880s)
Authors: various
Subjects:
Publisher: New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers
Contributing Library: Brigham Young University-Idaho, David O. McKay Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brigham Young University-Idaho

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h. Garden patches, for all thatpersistent hoe and rake can do, commonlylook at last like spots given over to weedsand grasses. Sidewalks quickly lose theirborders. Pavements w^ould soon disap-pear from sight; the winding of a distantstream through the fields can be readilyfollowed by the line of communistic vege-tation that rushes there to fight for life,from the minutest creeping vines to foresttrees. Every neglected fence corner be-comes an area for a fresh colony. Leaveone of these sweet, humanized woodlandpastures alone for a short period of years,it runs wild with a dense young naturalforest; vines shoot up to the tops of thetallest trees, and then tumble over ingreen sprays on the heads of others. A kind, true, patient, self-helpful soilif ever there was one! Some of theselands after being cultivated, not alwaysscientifically, but always without artificialfertilizers, for more than three-quarters ofa century, are now, if properly treated,equal in productiveness to the best farm-
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374 HARPERS NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. ing lands of England. Tlie farmer fromone of these old fields will take two dif-ferent crops in a season. He gets twocuttings of clover from a meadow, andhas rich grazing left. A few of thesecounties have at a time produced three-fourths of the entire hemp product of theUnited States. The State itself has atdifferent times stood first in wheat andhemp and Indian corn and wool and to-bacco and flax, and this although half itsterritory is covered with virgin forests.When lands under improper treatmenthave become impoverished, their product-iveness has been restored, not by artificialfertilizers, but by simple rotation of crops,with natures own help. The soil restson decomposable limestone, which annu-ally gives up to it in solution all the es-sential mineral plant food that a judicioussystem of agriculture should ever remove.The transition from material conditionsto the forms of life that they insure ishere natural. Soil and air and climate,the entire a

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