What I know of farming:

VII.

TREES – WOODLAND – FORESTS

I am not at all sentimental – much less mawkish – regarding the destruction of trees. Descended from several generations of timber-cutters (for my paternal ancestors came to America in 1640), and myself engaged for three years in land-clearing, I realize that trees exist for use rather than for ornament, and have no more scruple as to cutting timber in a forest than as to cutting grass in a meadow. Utility is the reason and end of all vegetable growth – of a hickory's no less than a corn-stalk's. I have always considered "Woodman, spare that tree," just about the most mawkish bit of badly versified prose in our language, and never could guess how it should touch the sensibilities of any one. Understand, then, that I urge the planting of trees mainly because I believe it will pay, and the preservation, improvement, and extension, of forests, for precisely that reason.

Yet I am not insensible to the beauty and grace lent by woods, and groves, and clumps or rows of trees, to the landscape they diversify. I feel the force of Emerson's averment, that "Beauty is its own excuse for being," and know that a homestead embowered in, belted by, stately, graceful elms, maples, and evergreens, is really worth more, and will sell for more, than if it were naked field and meadow. I consider it one positive advantage (to balance many disadvantages) of our rocky, hilly, rugged Eastern country, that it will never, in all probability, be so denuded of forests as the rich, facile prairies and swales of the Great Valley may be. Our winds are less piercing, our tornadoes less destructive, than those of the Great West. I doubt whether there is another equal area of the earth's surface whereon so many kinds of valuable trees grow spontaneously and rapidly, defying eradication, as throughout New England and on either slope of the Alleghenies; and this profusion of timber and foliage may well atone for, or may be fairly weighed against, many deficiencies and drawbacks. The Yankee, who has been accustomed to see trees spring up spontaneously wherever they were not kept down by ax, or plow, or scythe, and to cross running water every half mile of a Summer day's journey, may well be made homesick, by two thousand miles of naked, dusty, wind-swept Plains, whereon he finds no water for fifty to a hundred miles, and knows it impossible to cut an ax-helve, much more an axle-tree, in the course of a wearying journey. No Eastern farmer ever realized the blessedness of abundant and excellent wood and water until he had wandered far from his boyhood's home.

No one may yet be able fully to explain the inter-dependence of these two blessings; but the fact remains. All over "the Plains," there is evidence that trees grew and flourished where none are now found, and that springs and streams were then frequent and abiding where none now exist. A prominent citizen of Nevada, who explored southward from Austin to the Colorado, assured me that his party traveled for days in the bed of what had once been a considerable river, but in which it was evident that no water had flowed for years. And I have heard that since the Mormons have planted trees over considerable sections of Utah, rains in Summer are no longer rare, and Salt Lake evinces, by a constant though moderate increase of her volume of waters, that the equilibrium of rain-fall with evaporation in the Great Basin has been fully restored – or rather, that the rain-fall is now taking the lead.

I have a firm faith that all the great deserts of the Temperate and Torrid Zones will yet be reclaimed by irrigation and tree-planting. The bill which Congress did not pass, nor really consider, whereby it was proposed, some years since, to give a section of the woodless Public Lands remote from settlement to every one who, in a separate township, would plant and cherish a quarter-section of choice forest-trees, ought to have been passed – with modifications, perhaps, but preserving the central idea. Had ten thousand quarter-sections, in so many different townships of the Plains, been thus planted to timber ten to twenty years ago, and protected from fire and devastation till now, the value of those Plains for settlement would have been nearly or quite doubled.

A capital mistake, it seems to me, is being made by some of the dairy farmers of our own State. One who has a hundred acres of good soil, whereof twenty or thirty are wooded, cuts off his timber entirely, calculating that the additional grass that he may grow in its stead will pay for all the coal he needs for fuel, so that he will make a net gain of the time he has hitherto devoted each Winter to cutting and hauling wood. He does not consider how much his soil will lose in Summer moisture, how his springs and runnels will be dried up, nor how the sweep of harsh winds will be intensified, by baring his hill-tops and ravines to sun and breeze so utterly. In my deliberate judgment, a farm of one hundred acres will yield more feed, with far greater uniformity of product from year to year, if twenty acres of its ridge-crests, ravine-sides, and rocky places, are thickly covered with timber, than if it be swept clean of trees and all devoted to grass. Hence, I insist that the farmer who sweeps off his wood and resolves to depend on coal for fuel, hoping to increase permanently the product of his dairy, makes a sad miscalculation.

Spain, Italy, and portions of France, are now suffering from the improvidence that devoured their forests, leaving the future to take care of itself. I presume the great empires of antiquity suffered from the same folly, though to a much greater extent. The remains of now extinct races who formerly peopled and tilled the central valleys of this continent, and especially the Territory of Arizona, probably bear witness to a similar recklessness, which is paralleled by our fathers' and our own extermination of the magnificent forests of White Pine which, barely a century ago, covered so large a portion of the soil of our Northern States. Vermont sold White Pine abundantly to England through Canada within my day: she is now supplying her own wants from Canada at a cost of not less than five times the price she sold for; and she will be paying still higher rates before the close of this century. I entreat our farmers not to preserve every tree, good, bad, or indifferent, that may happen to be growing on their lands – but, outside of the limited districts wherein the primitive forest must still be cut away in order that land may be obtained for cultivation, to plant and rear at least two better trees for every one they may be impelled to cut down. How this may, in the average, be most judiciously done, I will try to indicate in the succeeding chapter.

VIII.

GROWING TIMBER – TREE-PLANTING

In my judgment, the proportion of a small farm that should be constantly devoted to trees (other than fruit) is not less than one-fourth; while, of farms exceeding one hundred acres in area, that proportion should be not less than one-third, and may often be profitably increased to one-half. I am thinking of such as are in good part superficially rugged and rocky, or sandy and sterile, such as New-England, eastern New-York, northern New-Jersey, with both slopes of the Alleghenies, as well as the western third of our continent, abound in. It may be that it is advisable to be content with a smaller proportion of timber in the Prairie States and the broad, fertile intervales which embosom most of our great rivers for at least a part of their course; but I doubt it. And there is scarcely a farm in the whole country, outside of the great primitive forests in which openings have but recently been made, in which some tree-planting is not urgently required.

"Too much land," you will hear assigned on every side as a reason for poor farming and meager crops. Ask an average farmer in New-England, in Virginia, in Kentucky, or in Alabama, why the crops of his section are in the average no better, and the answer, three times in four, will be, "Our farmers have too much land" – that is, not too much absolutely, but too much relatively to their capital, stock, and general ability to till effectively. The habitual grower of poor crops will proffer this explanation quite as freely and frequently as his more thrifty neighbor. And what every one asserts must have a basis of truth.

Now, I do not mean to quarrel with the instinct which prompts my countrymen to buy and hold too much land. They feel, as I do, that land is still cheap almost anywhere in this country – cheap, if not in view of the income now derived from it, certainly in contemplation of the price it must soon command and the income it might, under better management, be made to yield. Under this conviction – or, if you please, impression – every one is intent on holding on to more land than he can profitably till, if not more than he can promptly pay for.

What I do object to is simply this – that thousands, who have more land than they have capital to work profitably, will persist in half-tilling many acres, instead of thoroughly farming one-half or one third so many, and getting the rest into wood so fast as may be. I am confident that two-thirds of all our farmers would improve their circumstances and increase their incomes by concentrating their efforts, their means, their fertilizers, upon half to two-thirds of the area they now skim and skin, and giving the residue back to timber-growing.

In my own hilly, rocky, often boggy, Westchester – probably within six of being the oldest Agricultural County in the Union – I am confident that ten thousand acres might to-morrow be given back to forest with profit to the owners and advantage to all its inhabitants. It is a fruit-growing, milk-producing, truck-farming county, closely adjoining the greatest city of the New World; hence, one wherein land can be cultivated as profitably as almost anywhere else – yet I am satisfied that half its surface may be more advantageously devoted to timber than to grass or tillage. Nay; I doubt that one acre in a hundred of rocky land – that is, land ribbed or dotted with rocks that the bar or the rock-hook cannot lift from their beds, and which it will not as yet pay to blast – is now tilled to profit, or ever will be until it shall be found advisable to clear them utterly of stone breaking through or rising within two feet of the surface. The time will doubtless arrive in which many fields will pay for clearing of stone that would not to-day; these, I urge, should be given up to wood now, and kept wooded until the hour shall have struck for ridding them of every impediment to the steady progress of both the surface and the subsoil plow.

Were all the rocky crests and rugged acclivities of this County bounteously wooded once more, and kept so for a generation, our floods would be less injurious, our springs unfailing, and our streams more constant and equable; our blasts would be less bitter, and our gales less destructive to fruit; we should have vastly more birds to delight us by their melody and aid us in our not very successful war with devouring insects; we should grow peaches, cherries, and other delicate fruits, which the violent caprices of our seasons, the remorseless devastations of our visible and invisible insect enemies, have all but annihilated; and we should keep more cows and make more milk on two-thirds of the land now devoted to grass than we actually do from the whole of it. And what is true of Westchester is measurably true of every rural county in the Union.

I have said that I believe in cutting trees as well as in growing them; I have not said, and do not mean to say, that I believe in cutting everything clean as you go. That was once proper in Westchester; it is still advisable in forest-covered regions, where the sun must be let in before crops can be grown; but, in nine cases out of ten, timber should be thinned or culled out rather than cut off; and, for every tree taken away, at least two should be planted or set out.

We have pretty well outgrown the folly of letting every apple-tree bear such fruit as it will; though in the orchard of my father's little farm in Amherst, N. H., whereon I was born, no tree had ever been grafted when I bade adieu to it in 1820; and I presume none has been to this day. By this time, almost every farmer realizes that he can't afford to grow little, gnarly, villainously sour or detestably bitter-sweet apples, when, by duly setting a graft at a cost of two dimes, he may make that identical tree yield Greenings or Pippins at least as bounteously. I presume the cumulative experience of fifty or sixty generations of apple-growers has ripened this conclusion. Why do they not infer readily and generally that growing indifferent timber where the best and most valued would grow as rapidly, is a stupid, costly blunder? It seems to me that whoever has attained the conviction that apple-trees should be grafted ought to know that it is wasteful to grow Red Oak, Beech, White Maple, and Alder, where White Oak, Hickory, Locust, and White Pine, might be grown with equal facility, in equal luxuriance, provided the right seeds were planted, and a little pains taken to keep down, for a year or two, the shoots spontaneously sent up by the wrong ones.

North of the Potomac, and east of the Ohio, and (I presume) in limited districts elsewhere, rocky, sterile woodlands, costing $2 to $50 per acre according to location, etc., are to-day the cheapest property to be bought in the United States. Even though nothing were done with them but keep out fire and cattle, and let the young trees grow as they will, money can be more profitably and safely invested in lands covered by young timber than in anything else. The parent, who would invest a few thousands for the benefit of children or grandchildren still young, may buy woodlands which will be worth twenty times their present cost within the next twenty years. But better even than this would it be to buy up rocky, craggy, naked hill-sides and eminences which have been pastured to death, and, shutting out cattle inflexibly, scratch these over with plow, mattock, hoe, or pick, as circumstances shall dictate, plant them thickly with Chestnut, Walnut, Hickory, White Oak, and the seeds of Locust and White Pine. I say Locust, though not yet certain that this tree must not be started in garden or nursery-beds and transplanted when two or three years old, so puny and feeble is it at the outset, and so likely to be smothered under leaves or killed out by its more favored neighbors. I have experiments in progress not yet matured, which may shed light on this point before I finish these essays.

Plant thickly, and of diverse kinds, so as to cover the ground promptly and choke out weeds and shrubs, with full purpose to thin and prune as circumstances shall dictate.

Many farmers are averse to planting timber, because (they think) nothing can be realized therefrom for the next twenty or thirty years, which is as long as they expect to live. But this is a grave miscalculation. Let us suppose a rocky, hilly pasture-lot of ten or twenty acres rudely scratched over as I have suggested, and thickly seeded with hickory nuts and white oak acorns only: within five years, it will yield abundantly of hoop poles, though the better, more promising half be left to mature, as they should be; two years later, another and larger crop of hoop-poles may be cut, still sparing the best; and thenceforth a valuable crop of timber may be taken from that land; for, if cut at the proper season, at least two thrifty sprouts will start from every stump; and so that wood will yield a clear income each year while its best trees are steadily growing and maturing. I do not advise restriction to those two species of timber; but I insist that a young plantation of forest-trees may and should yield a clear income in every year after its fourth.

As to the Far West – the Plains, the Parks, and the Great Basin – there is more money to be made by dotting them with groves of choice timber than by working the richest veins of the adjacent mountains. Whoever will promptly start, near a present or prospective railroad, forty acres of choice trees – Hickory, White Oak, Locust, Chestnut, and White Pine – within a circuit of three hundred miles from Denver, on land which he has made or is making provision to irrigate – may begin to sell trees therefrom two years hence, and persist in selling annually henceforth for a century – at first, for transplanting; very soon, for a variety of uses in addition to that.

– But this paper grows too long, and I must postpone to the next my more especial suggestions to young farmers with regard to tree-planting.

IX.

PLANTING AND GROWING TREES

Whoever has recently bought, inherited, or otherwise become the owner of a farm, has usually found some part or parts of it devoted to wood; and this, if not in excess, he will mainly preserve, while he studies and plans with a view to the ultimate devotion to timber of just those portions of his land that are best adapted to that use. In locating that timber, I would have him consider these suggestions:

I. Land wisely planted with trees, and fenced so far as need be to keep out cattle, costs nothing. Whatever else you grow involves labor and expenditure; trees grow of their own accord. You may neglect them utterly – may wander over the earth and be absent for ten or twenty years, while your fences decay and your fields are overcropped to exhaustion; even your meadows may be run out by late mowing and close feeding at both ends of the season, till a dozen acres will hardly subsist a span of horses and a cow; but your woods need only to be let alone to insure that their value shall have decidedly increased during your absence. They will richly reward labor and care in thinning, trimming, and transplanting – you may profitably employ in them any time that you can spare them – but they will do very well if simply let alone. And, unlike any other product with which I am acquainted, you may take crop after crop of wood from the same lot, and the soil will be richer and more productive after the last than it was before the first. Whether wholly because their roots permeate and break up the soil during their life and enrich it in their decay, or for diverse reasons, it is certainly true that land – and especially poor land – is enriched by growing upon it a crop of almost any timber, the evergreens possibly excepted. So, should you ever have land that you cannot till to profit, whether because it is too poor, or because you have a sufficiency that is better, you should at once devote it to wood.

II. Your springs and streams will be rendered more equable and enduring by increasing the area and the luxuriance of your timber. They may have become scanty and capricious under a policy of reckless, wholesale destruction of trees; they will be rëenforced and reinvigorated by doubling the area of your woods, while quadrupling the number, and increasing the average size, of your trees.

III. All ravines and steep hill-sides should be devoted to trees. Every acre too rocky to be thoroughly cleared of stone and plowed should be set apart for tree-growing. Wherever the soil will be gullied or washed away by violent rains if under tillage, it should be excluded from cultivation and given up to trees. Men often doubt the profit of heavy manuring; and well they may, if three-fourths of the fertilizers applied are soaked out and swept away by flooding rains or sudden thaws and floated off to some distant sea or bay; but let all that is applied to the soil only remain there till it is carted away in crops, and it will hardly be possible to manure too highly for profit.

IV. Trees, especially evergreens, may be so disposed as to modify agreeably the average temperature of your farm, or at least of the most important parts of it. When I bought my place – or rather the first installment of it – the best spot I could select for a garden lay at the foot of a hill which half surrounded it on the south and east, leaving it exposed to the full sweep of north and north-west winds; so that, though the soil was gravelly and warm, my garden was likely to be cold and backward. To remedy this, I planted four rows of evergreens (Balsam Fir, Pine, Red Cedar, and Hemlock), along a low ridge bounding it on the north, following an inward curve of the ridge at its west end; and those evergreens have in sixteen years grown into very considerable trees, forming a shady, cleanly, inviting bower, or sylvan retreat, daintily carpeted with the fallen leaves of the overhanging firs. I judge that the average temperature of the soil for some yards southward of this wind-break is at least five degrees higher, throughout the growing season, than it formerly was or would now be if these evergreens were swept away; while the aspect of the place is agreeably diversified, and even beautified, by their appearance. I believe it would sell for some hundreds of dollars more with than without that thrifty, growing clump of evergreens.

V. I have already urged, though not strongly enough, that crops, as well as springs, will be improved by keeping the crests of ridges thickly wooded, thus depositing moisture in Winter and Spring, to be slowly yielded to the adjacent slopes during the heat and drouth of Summer. I firmly believe that the slopes of a hill whose crest is heavily wooded will yield larger average crops than slope and crest together would do if both were bare of trees.

VI. The banks of considerable streams, ponds, etc., may often be so planted with trees that these will shade more water than land, to the comfort and satisfaction of the fish, and the protection of those banks from abrasion by floods and rapid currents. Sycamore, Elm, and Willow, do well here; if choice Grape-Vines are set beside and allowed to run over some of them, the effect is good, and the grapes acceptable to man and bird.

VII. Never forget that a good tree grows as thriftily and surely as a poor one. Many a farmer has to-day ten to forty acres of indifferent cord-wood where he might, at a very slight cost, have had instead an equal quantity of choice timber, worth ten times as much. Hickory, Chestnut, and Walnut, while they yield nuts that can be eaten or sold, are worth far more as timber than an equal bulk of Beech, Birch, Hemlock, or Red Oak. Chestnut has more than doubled in value within the last few years, mainly because it has been found excellent for the inside wood-work of dwellings. Locust also seems to be increasing in value. Ten acres of large, thrifty Locust near this City would now buy a pretty good farm; as I presume it would, if located near any of our great cities.