--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.

It may interest grape-growers in the East to be told that of what we call
"foreign grapes," the Muscat of Alexandria succeeds best in these moist,
peaty lands.