Every scientific agriculturist knows that erosion is one of the chief causes of loss in soil fertility and that in the basins and deltas of streams and rivers there is going to waste enough muck to make all of our land rich.  But the cost of getting this fertility back to the soil has thus far proved too great for us to undertake the task of restoration.  It is conceivable, however, that the time may come when we shall undertake the work in earnest and then the dream of Washington will be realized.

The spring and summer of 1785 proved excessively dry, and the crops suffered, as they always do in times of drought.  The wheat yield was poor and chinch bugs attacked the corn in such myriads that our Farmer found “hundreds of them & their young under the blades and at the lower joints of the Stock.”  By the middle of August “Nature had put on a melancholy look.”  The corn was “fired in most places to the Ear, with little appearance of yielding if Rain should now come & a certainty of making nothing if it did not.”

Like millions of anxious farmers before and after him, he watched eagerly for the rain that came not.  He records in his diary that on August 17th a good deal of rain fell far up the river, but as for his fields—­it tantalizingly passed by on the other side, and “not enough fell here to wet a handkerchief.”  On the eighteenth, nineteenth and twenty-second clouds and thunder and lightning again awakened hopes but only slight sprinkles resulted.  On the twenty-seventh nature at last relented and, to his great satisfaction, there was a generous downpour.

The rain was beneficial to about a thousand grains of Cape of Good Hope wheat that Washington had just sown and by the thirty-first he was able to note that it was coming up.  For several years thereafter he experimented with this wheat.  He found that it grew up very rank and tried cutting some of it back.  But the variety was not well adapted to Virginia and ultimately he gave it up.

In this period he also tried Siberian wheat, put marl on sixteen square rods of meadow[4], plowed under rye, and experimented with oats, carrots, Eastern Shore peas, supposed to be strengthening to land, also rib grass, burnet and various other things.  He planted potatoes both with and without manure and noted carefully the difference in yields.  At this time he favored planting corn in rows about ten feet apart, with rows of potatoes, carrots, or peas between.  He noted down that his experience showed that corn ought to be planted not later than May 15th, preferably by the tenth or perhaps even as early as the first, in which his practice would not differ much from that of to-day.  But he came to an erroneous conclusion when he decided that wheat ought to be sown in August or at the latter end of July, for this was playing into the hands of his enemy, the Hessian fly, which is particularly destructive to early sown wheat.  Later he seems to have changed his mind on that point, for near the end of his life he instructed his manager to get the wheat in by September 10th.  Another custom which he was advocating was that of fall and winter plowing and he had as much of it done as time and weather would permit.  All of his experiments in this period were painstakingly set down and he even took the trouble in 1786 to index his agricultural notes and observations for that year.