The soil seemed to me, so far as they dig into it—­say six feet deep—­to be, not peat, but a mass of undecayed or but partly decayed roots, strongly adhering together, so that the upper part of a levee, taken of course from the lowest part of the ditch, lay in firm sods or tussocks.  These, however, seem to decay pretty rapidly on exposure to the air.  The drainage is not usually deeper than four feet, and in places the water-level was but three feet below the surface.  The newly reclaimed land being very light, suffers from the dry season, and is often irrigated, which, as it lies below the river-level, can be quickly and cheaply done.

Sherman Island was one of the earliest to be reclaimed, and there I visited the fine farm of Mr. Bigelow—­a New Hampshire man, I believe, and apparently a thorough farmer.  He has lived on tule land ten years, and his fields were consequently in the finest condition.  Here I saw a three-hundred-acre field of wheat, as fine as wheat could be.  He thought he should get about forty-five bushels per acre this year.  He had got, he told me, between sixty-five and seventy bushels per acre, and without any further labor the next year brought him from the same fields fifty-two bushels per acre as a “volunteer” or self-seeded crop.

Here I saw luxuriant red clover and blue grass, and he had also a field of carrots, which do well on this alluvial bottom, it seems.  But what surprised me more was to find that apples, pears, peaches, plums, grapes, apricots—­all the fruits—­do well on this soil.  With us I think the pear would not do well on peat; but here it withstood last year’s flood, which broke a levee and overflowed Mr. Bigelow’s farm, and the trees do not appear to have suffered.  He had also wind-breaks of osier willow, which of course grows rapidly, and had been a source of profit to him in, yielding cuttings for sale.

Timothy does not do well on tule land, as its roots do not push down deep enough, and the surface of such light soils always dries up rapidly.  Mr. Bigelow told me that he once sowed alfalfa in February with wheat, and took off forty-five bushels of wheat per acre, and a ton and a half of alfalfa later; and pastured (in a thirty-acre field) twenty-five head of stock till Christmas on the same land, after the hay was cut.

They have one great advantage on the tule lands—­they can put in their crops at any time from November to the last of June.

It was very curious to sit on the veranda at the farm-house, after dinner, with a high levee immediately in front of us almost hiding the Sacramento River, and with a broad canal—­the inner ditch—­full of fresh water, running along the boundary as far as the eye could reach, the level of the levee broken occasionally by tide-gates.  The prospect would have been monotonous had we not had at one side the lovely mountain range of which Mount Diablo is the prominent peak.  But the great expanse of clean fields, level as a billiard-table, and in as fine tilth as though this was a model farm, was a delight to the eye, too.