For a Refractory Soil.

What can I do to soil that dries out and crusts over so hard that it won’t permit vegetable growth?  A liberal amount of stable manure has been applied, and the land deeply plowed, harrowed and cultivated, but as soon as water gets on it, it forms a deep crust on evaporation.  Will guano help, or is sodium nitrate or potash the thing?

None of the things you mention are of any particular use for the specific purpose you describe.  Keep on working in stable manure or rotten straw, or any other coarse vegetable matter, when the soil is moist enough for its decay.  Plow under all the weeds you can grow, or green barley or rye, and later grow a crop of peas or vetches to plow in green.  Keep at this till the pesky stuff gets mellow.  If you think the soil is alkaline, use gypsum freely; if not, dose it with lime to the limit of your purse and patience, and put in all the tillage you can whenever the soil breaks well.

More Manure, Water and Cultivation Required.

I have a small place on a hillside, with brown soil about one to two feet deep to hardpan and I am getting rather discouraged, as so many things fail to come up and others grow so very slowly after they are up.  A neighbor planted some dahlia roots the same time I did.  Only one of mine came up and it is not in bloom yet, while several of his have been blooming for some weeks and are ten times as large in mass of foliage as mine with its lone stalk and one little bud on the top.  Peas came up and kept dying at the bottom with blossoms at the top tilt they were four or five feet high, but I never could get enough peas for a mess.  Can you help me get this thing right?

Use of stable manure and water freely.  Your trouble probably lies either in the lack of plant food or of moisture in the soil.  This, of course, is supposing that you cultivate well so that the moisture you use shall not be evaporated and the ground hardened by the process.  During the summer a good surface application of stable manure to which water can be applied would be better than to work manure into the soil, which should be done at the beginning of the rainy season.  As your soil is so shallow it will be well for you to stand along the side of the plant much of the time with a bucket of water in one hand and a shovel of manure in the other.

Planting Trees in Alkali Soil.

My land contains a considerable quantity of both the black and white alkalies, the upper two feet being a rather heavy, sticky clay, the next three feet below being fine sand, containing more or less alkali, while immediately underneath this sand is a dense black muck in which, summer and winter, is found the ground-water.  Do you think the following method of setting trees would be advantageous.  Excavate for each tree a hole three feet in diameter and three feet deep.  Fill in a layer of three or four inches of coarse hay, forming a lining for the excavation.  Then fill the hole with sandy loam in which the tree is to be set.  The sandy loam would give the young tree a good start, while the lining of hay would break up the capillary attraction between the filled-in sand and the ground-water in the surrounding alkali-charged soil.