Page:Notes on five years' experiments on hop manuring conducted at Golden Green, Hadlow, Tonbridge.djvu/8

6 have been obtained with like quantities of nitrogen supplied in the form of sulphate of ammonia, Peruvian guano, rape cake, &c.

It is not, of course, to be supposed that any hop-grower would year after year use, as we are using, nothing but phosphates, potash, and nitrate of soda in his hop gardens. Miscellaneous feeding is probably good for plants as well as for animals, and the quantity of nitrate of soda to be used in a system of miscellaneous manuring will obviously depend on the quantity of nitrogen supplied in other forms.

In addition to our purely chemically manured plots, however, we have had each year, for purposes of general comparison, a trial plot manured solely with dung, and incidentally we have been able also to institute comparisons between the yield of our various experimental plots and the yield of the remaining portion of the field, and sometimes with the yield of certain othe [sic] parts of the farm, obtained under miscellaneous manuring similar to that followed in ordinarily accepted hop-growing practice.

Our experiments began at the end of 1894, when a garden of young Fuggles hops, about to enter the first year of poling, was selected for the purpose. Our experimental plots are each one-sixth of an acre in area, and they run parallel with one another, there being four rows of hills in each. During the first season all the plots were limed and dunged. In the second, third, and fourth seasons no dung has been used on six of the plots, which have been treated with purely chemical fertilisers, phosphates having been abundantly supplied every year in the alternating forms of superphosphate and basic slag. Potash also has been supplied—kainit in 1895, muria e of potash in 1896, sulphate of potash in 1897 and 1898, an kainit in 1899.