But in four or five years the soil was so
exhausted that only five or six bushels an acre, even in the better
fields, was obtained, although when first ploughed twenty and
twenty-five bushels was about the ordinary yield. More attention was
then paid to corn, but without fertilizers the corn-crop also became
very meagre. At last it was discovered that English clover would grow
on even the exhausted fields, and that when ploughed under and planted
with corn, or even wheat, wonderful crops were raised. This caused a
complete change in farming methods; the farmers raised fertilizing
clover, planted corn, and fed the crop to cattle and hogs.
But no crop raised in our wilderness was so surprisingly rich and
sweet and purely generous to us boys and, indeed, to everybody as the
watermelons and muskmelons. We planted a large patch on a sunny
hill-slope the very first spring, and it seemed miraculous that a few
handfuls of little flat seeds should in a few months send up a hundred
wagon-loads of crisp, sumptuous, red-hearted and yellow-hearted fruits
covering all the hill.
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