Although our practice has been more extensive, and is more skillful, in eating sweet potatoes than in raising them, we yet adventure some remarks: No root can live and grow without food from the leaf; if the tops be permitted to root, so much nutriment is subtracted from the tubers as is diverted to these new roots. Those who are best skilled in their cultivation, raise their vines up so as to detach the roots, but do not twist them round the hill; which, by crushing or covering the leaves, would render the vines unhealthy. As to vines of the _Cucurbitacæ_, their fruit not being under ground, it is not necessary that such an amount of prepared sap should go to the root as if tubers were formed. There is, in such vines, a great liability to disease and injury near the hill. The vines shrink and dry near the base; and however flourishing the running end may otherwise be, it is destroyed. If roots are secured at several points along the vine, we remove the chances of its prematurely dying, without withdrawing any sap necessary for the maturation of its fruit.
Almost every kind of soil requires a management of its own. That proper for clays, and that proper for bottom-lands, cannot be interchanged. Bottom lands are usually composed largely of vegetable matter and sand; and are therefore light, and easy to work; yet, as they are now managed, they admit a less variety of crops than the tougher and more unmanageable clay lands.
BOTTOM-LANDS FOR CORN.—Our corn-lands, strictly so called, consist of rich intervales and river bottoms. On these corn is raised year after year, without manuring, fallowing, clover, or any change; but one constant, successive corn, corn, corn. It is supposed that corn may be had for an indefinite period, so far as mere exhaustion of the soil is concerned, if the right course is pursued. Some of the best farmers in this region _hog_ their corn lands. _Hogging_ is turning the hogs in upon the ripe corn, and letting them harvest it in their own way. The saving of labor of gathering the corn and feeding it out is very great. Some single farmers fatten from one to five hundred head of hogs; but if this number were fed by hand and the grain gathered for them it would require a force which would eat up the profits. When the fatting hogs have eaten off the field (temporary fences divide large fields into inclosures of convenient size) they are turned into another, and the stock-hogs for another year, are let in to glean and root for the waste and trampled corn. In this way nothing is lost.