Excerpt from The Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato

It is held in such universal esteem as to be regarded as nearly indispensable. This fact is sufficient to render a thorough knowledge of the best varieties for use, the character of soil best adapted to their growth, their cultivation and after-care, matters of the highest importance to the farmers of the United States.

The main object of this essay is so to instruct the novice in potato-growing that he may be enabled to go to work understandingly and produce the potato in its highest perfection, and realize from his labors bestowed on the crop the greatest possible profits.

Soil Required - Its Preparation.

The potato is most profitably grown in a warm, dry, sandy, or gravelly loam, well filled with decayed vegetable matters. The famous potato lands of Lake County, Ohio, from which such vast quantities of potatoes arc shipped yearly, are yellow sand. This potato district is confined to ridges running parallel with Lake Erie, which, according to geological indications, have each at different periods defined its boundaries. This sand owes much of its potato-growing qualities to the sedimentary deposit of the lake and to manural properties furnished by the decomposition of the shells of water-snails, shell-fish, etc., that inhabited the waters.

New lands, or lands recently denuded of the forest, if sufficiently dry, produce tubers of the most excellent quality. Grown on dry, new land, the potato always cooks dry and mealy, and possesses an agreeable flavor and aroma, not to be attained in older soils. In no argillaceous soil can the potato be grown to perfection as regards quality. Large crops on such soil may be obtained in favorable seasons, but the tubers are invariably coarse-fleshed and ill-flavored. To produce roots of the best quality, the ground must be dry, deep, and porous; and it should be remembered that, to obtain very large crops, it is almost impossible to get too much humus in the soil. Humus is usually added to arable land either by plowing under green crops, such as clover, buckwheat, peas, etc., or by drawing and working in muck obtained from swamps and low places.

The muck should be drawn to the field in fall or winter, and exposed in small heaps to the action of frost. In the following spring, sufficient lime should be mixed with it to neutralize the acid, (which is found in nearly all muck,) and the whole be spread evenly and worked into the surface with harrow or cultivator.

Leaves from the woods, buckwheat straw, bean, pea, and hop vines, etc., plowed under long enough before planting to allow them time to rot, are very beneficial. Sea-weed, when bountifully applied, and turned under early in the fall, has no superior as a manure for the potato. No stable or barn-yard manure should be applied to this crop. If such nitrogenous manure must be used on the soil, it is better to apply it to some other crop, to be followed the succeeding year by potatoes. The use of stable manure predisposes the tubers to rot; detracts very much from the desired flavor; besides, generally not more than one half as many bushels can be grown per acre as can be obtained by using manures of a different nature. Market gardeners, many of whom from necessity plant on the same ground year after year, often use fine old stable manure with profit.

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