“If the table were spread again, if more fertilizer were added to the soil, that would be quite a different matter, and wheat would grow as well as it did the first time. But such a procedure would be bad management, for the very utmost should be made of one meal. Before further expenditure in the way of fertilizer let us exhaust the virtue of the fertilizer already applied. Azor dined well on what Jacques discarded; the hens were well fed with what Azor and the cat left. Let us take an example from this succession of eaters who utilize each in his own way the remnants worthless to the others. The wheat has exhausted, or nearly exhausted, all that is suitable for wheat; but just as Jacques the ox-driver left the bone, it has left in the soil a good many ingredients that make excellent food for other crops. In order, therefore, to utilize to the last ounce the first spreading of fertilizer, we must invite to the repast a guest of different tastes. This guest may be, for example, the potato. In soil that would have furnished but starvation diet for wheat the potato will find quite enough to live on, its tastes not being the same as the cereal’s. “Thus we have two successive crops for one coating of manure: we have sacks of potatoes with no additional outlay in fertilizer. Is that all? Not yet. After the wheat and the potatoes there is, to be sure, but meager nourishment left in the upper layer of the soil; but in the lower layers there remains the part of the fertilizer that the rain has washed down and dissolved and that the short roots of the preceding crops could not reach. To utilize this underlying matter and bring it up again to the surface in the form of forage let us now sow a plant with vigorous roots, such as clover, sainfoin, or, still better, lucerne, which will penetrate deeper. And so we get our third crop.