Plow

“ Follow the plow, whether in the fall or spring, with the disk and that with the smoothing harrow, if crops are to be sown soon afterward. If the land plowed in the fall is to lie fallow for the winter, leave it in the rough condition, except in localities where there is little or no snow and the winter temperature is high. ”

“ But those people have no holy reverence for their ancestors. They plow with a plow that is a sharp, curved blade of iron, and it cuts into the earth full five inches. And this is not all. They cut their grain with a horrid machine that mows down whole fields in a day. If I dared, I would say that sometimes they use a blasphemous plow that works by fire and vapor and tears up an acre of ground in a single hour—but —but—I see by your looks that you do not believe the things I am telling you. ”

“ It is as with a plow, that must travel many miles before the whole of a small field can be tilled, but with this important difference—the plow travels methodically up and down in parallel furrows; the eye wanders in devious curves, with abrupt bends, and the direction of its course at any instant depends on four causes: on the most convenient muscular motion in a general sense, on idiosyncrasy, on the mood, and on the associations current at the moment. ”

“ This is one of the most important matters in soil-culture. When, how, and how much, shall we plow? are the three questions involving the whole. When should plowing be done? As it respects wet or dry, plow sandy or gravelly land whenever you are ready. It will neither be hard when dry, nor injured by being plowed when very wet. Good loams may be plowed at all times except when excessively wet. Clays can only be worked profitably when neither excessively wet or dry. Plowing land in a warm rain is almost equal to a coat of manure. ”

“ The air is cold above the woods; All silent is the earth and sky, Except with his own lonely moods The blackbird holds a colloquy. Over the broad hill creeps a beam, Like hope that gilds a good man's brow; And now ascends the nostril-steam Of stalwart horses come to plow. Ye rigid plowmen, bear in mind Your labor is for future hours! Advance—spare not—nor look behind— Plow deep and straight with all your powers. Richard Hengist Horne [1803-1884]
THE USEFUL PLOW A country life is sweet! ”

“ Constant plowing at about the same depth will often form a hard under-floor by the action of the plow, through which neither roots nor rain can well penetrate; subsoiling will relieve a field thus conditioned. ”

“ PLOWBOY
After the last red sunset glimmer,
Black on the line of a low hill rise,
Formed into moving shadows, I saw
A plowboy and two horses lined against the gray,
Plowing in the dusk the last furrow. ”

“ The active agent whatever it is, has been known to seize hold of a chain attached to a plow and draw the plow about, turning the stiff sod for a considerable [Pg 147] distance. (See Loomis on the tornado at Stow, Ohio, American Journal of Science, vol. xxxiii. p. 368.)
i. In passing over ponds, the spout has taken up all the water and fish, and scattered them in every direction, and to a great distance.
j. The barometer falls very little during the passage of the spout. (See the Natchez hurricane of 1827, Espy page 337.) Not more than it frequently does during gentle showers. ”

“ Too much ice must not be grooved out by the plows in advance, lest in case of rain the channels should fill and freeze solid and the labor be wasted. So it is frequently necessary for the workers at the plow to be out long before light in the morning, grooving out blocks for the harvesters when the day begins. It is a picturesque sight, these hardy men, muffled to their ears, following the gingerly-treading teams back and forth over the ice-fields by the light of flaring, smoky torches hung on poles stuck in the ice. ”

“ There is no storm so severe that I dare to hide at home, for fear of my lord, but when the oxen are yoked, and the share and coulter have been fastened to the plow, I must plow a whole acre or more every day. ”

“ The hives are to be opened the next morning. At the next natural swarming time the swarms can be again divided. The hive cannot freeze, and it is proof against mice.
IMPROVED PLOW STOCK.
Robert Weber, New Ulm, Texas.—In this invention, by loosening a nut, the point of draft attachment may be raised and lowered to cause the plow to work deeper or shallower in the ground, or turned to one or the other side, to cause the plow to take or leave land, and may be secured in place when adjusted by again tightening the nut. ”

“ The plow is so made that it opens a deep furrow, turning both to the right and left, and is followed by a heavy iron roller that hardens the earth, both on the sides and the bottom of the surface-drain, thus doing very handsome work. ”

“ Undoubtedly, the fall plowing of dry land is somewhat difficult, but the good results more than pay the farmer for his trouble. Late fall plowing, after the fall rains have softened the land, is preferable to spring plowing. ”

“ In this climate in which we do not commonly bury our dead in the winter on account of the frozen ground, and find ourselves exposed on a hard, bleak crust, the coming out of the frost and the first turning up of the soil with a spade or plow, is an event of importance. ”

“ In the matter of plowing, the plowman usually went about breaking up the land for his neighbor, and in some towns a bounty was paid to anyone who would buy a plow and keep it in repair so that the neighborhood plowing could be done. ”

“ In Switzerland the farmer's plow is a wide shovel, which scrapes up and turns over the thin earthy skin of his native rock—and there the man of the plow is a hero. Now here, by our St. Nicholas road, was a grave, and it had a tragic story. A plowman was skinning his farm one morning—not the steepest part of it, but still a steep part—that is, he was not skinning the front of his farm, but the roof of it, near the eaves—when he absent-mindedly let go of the plow-handles to moisten his hands, in the usual way ”

“ Laying Out Squares or Rectangles with the Plow. If a good plowman can be secured, very satisfactory work can be done with the plow. In some cases a man can be found who needs nothing in the way of a guide, except two or three stakes. But with a sufficient number of stakes and [Pg 106] a marker attached to the plow, good results can be secured by almost any plowman.
Furrows should be run both lengthwise and crosswise of the field, their intersections marking the place where the trees are to stand. At each one set a stake. ”

“ A wooden plow on wheels is used, to which often eight or ten yoke of oxen or buffalo are hitched, with a man sitting on the yoke of each team, and a man behind to guide the plow. Each furrow is turned so slowly that the amount plowed each day would not equal a few hours’ work with an up-to-date plow and a strong team of horses, while the furrows are never over six inches deep. ”

“ In case land has to be plowed for grass-seeding, the plowing should be done as far as possible in advance of the seeding. Then the plowed land should be harrowed several times to get the land in a soft, mellow condition. ”

“ Plowing should be done deeply and thoroughly so that the falling water may immediately be drawn down to the full depth of the loose, spongy, plowed soil, away from the action of the sunshine or winds. The moisture thus caught will slowly work its way down into the lower layers of the soil. ”

“ If the rainfall is small and likely to come in light showers, dry plowing, if it turns up the land in large clods, might yield poorer results than land which is plowed after rain, because there would be so much moisture lost by drying out from the coarse surface when it came in amounts not adequate for deep penetration. ”

“ It is barely fifty years since woman began to ask questions and insist upon knowing, to claim freedom of movement, a chance to breathe. The time between has been a time of plowed fields, often muddy, usually stony, but the furrows are turning green and [148] the harvest will prove the wisdom of the plowing. ”

“ A number of experiment stations have compared plowing done in the early fall with plowing done late in the fall or in the spring, and with almost no exception it has been found that early fall plowing is water-conserving and in other ways advantageous. ”

“ If the plowing is not well done or if the land is too dry when plowed and the soil is left in great coarse lumps and clods, the air circulates readily among the clods and takes from them what little moisture they may have had and generally the soil is left in a worse condition than if it had not been plowed at all. ”

“ A glacier is a stupendous, ever-progressing, resistless plow. It pushes ahead of it masses of boulders which are packed together, and they stretch across the gorge, right in front of it, like a long grave or a long, sharp roof. ”

“ It is in condition to take up more water from spring rains than would be the case if it lay compact, and it does not lose water by the airing in the spring that plowing gives.
Early spring-plowing leaves land less subject to drouth than does later plowing. ”

“ There is difference of opinion everywhere as to whether the first plowing should be toward or away from the trees. In places where the soil is pretty heavy and the rainfall is apt to be quite large, plowing toward the trees and opening a dead furrow near the center seems to promote rapid distribution of surplus water. If the rainfall is less and arrangements for deep penetration are more necessary, the plowing can well be away from the trees, so as to direct the water toward the row. ”

“ Again, the practice of fall plowing, so very beneficial in latitudes where frosts are severe and long continued, is just the reverse in the far South. There our snow is rain, and the upturned furrows are washed down into a smooth, sticky mass by the winter storms. ”

“ An exception to deep plowing is in breaking up the original prairies of the West: they have to be broken with plows kept sharp as a knife, and not more than two inches deep. The grass then dies and the sod rots. But plowed deep, the grass comes up through the turf, and will prove troublesome for two or three years. ”

“ This sort of Land must not be stirred, i. e. plowed the Second time in wet Weather; for that will cause the Grass and Weeds to multiply, besides the treading the Ground into hard Dabs, &c. And, in dry Weather, the Plough will never enter any deeper than it went the first time; the Resistance below being so much more than the Pressure above, the Plough will rise up continually; or, if it goes deep enough for the Weight of Earth to keep it down, another Inconvenience will follow, which is that mentioned by Columella, Page 47. ”

“ The ground should be harrowed as soon as possible after it is plowed. It is a good plan to harrow the ground on the same day that it is plowed, or on the day following. Choose the middle of the prepared ground, which is about eighty-five by fifty feet, as your starting point, measure twenty-four feet east and west and set the net posts ”

“ And, like pebbles and other little people, rivers love to play in the rain. My! What a time! In a storm, with a gray flood pouring from the sky, you hear, mingled with the voice of wind and rain, the swash and gurgle of the eddies as the river goes along in its dance, wild with the joy of it all. In a mountain stream during a heavy rain, with wind, you can also hear the waves dashing against the rocks along the shore or in the stream, and the smothered, bumping, rumbling made by the boulders on the bottom knocking against each other. ”

“ It rays out and draws to it some floating films from secret cañons. Rain begins, "slow dropping veil of thinnest lawn;" a wind comes up and drives the formless thing across a meadow, or a dull lake pitted by the glancing drops, dissolving as it drives. Such rains relieve like tears.
The same season brings the rains that have work to do, ploughing storms that alter the face of things. These come with thunder and the play of live fire along the rocks. They come with great winds that try the pines for their work upon the seas and strike out the unfit. ”

“ The rain began to fall in sheets, and the wind nearly blew me over, but who could run away from such fishing? The surface of the river, deep blue-gray, seemed rising everywhere in little jets to meet the rain. Rapids, eddies, still waters, weedy edges, all looked alike; there were neither waves nor swirls nor glassy slicks, but all were roughly furry under the multitudinous [pg 151] assaults of the fierce rain-drops. The sky was mottled lead-color, the wind blew less strongly, but cold—cold. ”

“ The snow vanished swiftly from the laden branches of fir and spruce [Pg 248] and hemlock, and the silent woods stood up black and terrible against the weeping sky. On the ground and on the ice of pond and stream the snow shrank, settled, and assumed a grayish complexion. Water, presently, gathered in great spreading, leaden-coloured pools on the ice; and on the naked knolls the bare moss and petty shrubs began to emerge. Every narrow watercourse soon carried two streams,—the temperate, fettered, summer-mindful stream below the ice, and the swollen, turbulent flood above. ”

“ Thus even the meadow flood is parded, of various patches of color. Ever and anon the wind seems to drop down from over the hills in strong puffs, and then spread and diffuse itself in dark, fan-shaped figures over the surface of the water. It is glorious to see how it sports on the watery surface. You see a hundred such nimble-footed puffs drop and spread on all sides at once, and dash on, sweeping the surface of the water for forty rods in a few seconds, as if so many invisible spirits were playing tag there. ”

“ Although the solid mass of the water beneath is still unchanged, when the gusts fly across the waves and strike the cliffs the foam is blown upward, hissing, and bursts into smoke against the crags. From under the broadening cloud a faint whispering sound comes, thin and shrill like a broadened whisper of the wind in grass. ”

“ It is true that a wall of earth everywhere controls the flood to-day, and that the traveller in his boat does not see, as he would have seen two thousand years ago, the glint of water to the north and south at high tide over tufted grass and drowned banks of mud for miles upon either side of his going. ”