While at Fredericksburg this year visiting his mother and his sister Betty Lewis he learned of an interesting method of raising potatoes under straw and wrote down the details in his diary.  A little later when attending the Federal Convention he kept his eyes and ears open for agricultural information.  He learned how the Pennsylvanians cultivated buckwheat and visited the farm of a certain Jones, who was getting good results from the use of plaster of Paris.  With his usual interest in labor-saving machinery he inspected at Benjamin Franklin’s a sort of ironing machine called a mangle, “well calculated,” he thought, “for Table cloths & such articles as have not pleats & irregular foldings & would be very useful in large families.”

This year he had in wheat seven hundred acres, in grass five hundred eighty acres, in oats four hundred acres, in corn seven hundred acres, with several hundred more in buckwheat, barley, potatoes, peas, beans and turnips.

In 1788 he raised one thousand eighty-eight bushels of potatoes on one plantation, but they were not dug till December and in consequence some were badly injured by the frost.  An experiment that year was one of transplanting carrots between rows of corn and it was not successful.

He worked hard in these years, but, as many another industrious farmer has discovered, he found that he could do little unless nature smiled and fickle nature persisted in frowning.  In 1785 the rain seemed to forget how to fall, and in 1786 how to stop falling.  Some crops failed or were very short and soon he was so hard up that he was anxious to sell some lands or negroes to meet debts coming due.  In February, 1786, in sending fifteen guineas to his mother, he wrote: 

“I have now demands upon me for more than L500, three hundred and forty odd of which is due for the tax of 1786; and I know not where or when I shall receive one shilling with which to pay it.  In the last two years I made no crops.  In the first I was obliged to buy corn, and this year have none to sell, and my wheat is so bad I can neither eat it myself nor sell it to others, and tobacco I make none.  Those who owe me money cannot or will not pay it without suits, and to sue is to do nothing; whilst my expenses, not from any extravagance, or an inclination on my part to live splendidly, but for the absolute support of my family and the visitors who are constantly here, are exceedingly high.”

To bad crops were joined bad conditions throughout the country generally.  The government of the Confederation was dying of inanition, America was flooded with depreciated currency, both state and Continental.  In western Massachusetts a rebellion broke out, the rebels being largely discouraged debtors.  A state of chaos seemed imminent and would have resulted had not the Federal Convention, of which Washington was a member, created a new government.  Ultimately this government brought order and financial stability, but all this took time and Washington was so financially embarrassed in 1789 when he traveled to New York to be inaugurated President that he had to borrow money to pay the expenses of the journey.