n a light
sand made very rich by heavy, annual manuring for several years. They
were all perfectly watered and drained, in good heart, liberally
fertilized with manures of proved right proportions for each field, and
above all, the fields were put into and kept in perfect tilth by methods
suited to each case; while the plants used were of good stock and so
grown, set and cultivated that their growth was never stopped or hardly
checked for even a day. These conditions as to soil and culture,
together with seasons of exceptionally favorable weather, resulted in
uniformly large crops on these widely different soils.

[Illustration: FIG. 12--TOMATOES TRAINED TO STAKES ON A GEORGIA FARM]

The composition of the soil, then, as to its proportions of sand or clay
is of minor importance as regards a maximum yield or as to quality of
the fruit, except as it affects our ability to put and keep the soil in
good physical condition. The tomato crop, however, particularly when the
plants are trimmed and trained to stakes, as is the usual practice in
the South, as seen in Fig. 12, with crops grown for early shipment,
necessitates in the trimming and training of the plants and the
gathering of the fruit when it is in the right degree of maturity for
shipment a great deal of trampling of the surface regardless of whether
it is wet or dry. Consequently if the surface soil has any considerable
proportion of clay there is danger of compacting and even puddling it by
working when wet, to the great detriment of the crop. Again, a more or
less sandy surface soil can be much more easily worked than one with a
large proportion of clay. For these reasons our choice of a soil for the
lowest cost a bushel and probably for a maximum yield should be a rich
sandy or sandy loam surface soil overlying a well-drained clay
sub-soil. I would prefer one which was originally covered with a heavy
growth of beech and maple timber, though I should want it to be "old
land" at the time. Tomatoes do not succeed as well on prairie soils,
particularly if they are at all heavy, as they do on timbered lands, but
one need not despair of a profitable crop of tomatoes on any soil which
would give a fair crop of corn or of cotton.

=For early-ripening fruit.=--Sometimes the profit and satisfaction from
a tomato crop depend more largely upon the earliness of ripening than
upon the amount of yield or cost of growing. In such cases a warm, sandy
loam, or even a distinctly