Potatoes should be planted deep and early. If they are planted too near the surface they will ripen before they are fully grown or maybe get sunburned and unfit for eating. Choose your best potatoes for seed, if you plant from your own crop; or buy only the best varieties, if you must buy. But it is well to remember that there is always danger in potato seed raised elsewhere than on your own patch where you can watch conditions. Don’t use a potato for seed if it has a black thread running through it; a roughened or irregular circle on the skin, or a hollow center. Burn all such; else you will have diseased crops and give yourself no end of trouble and expense. Plant the seeds at least four inches deep and plow them in. The surface should be harrowed two or three times before the plants come up, and the crop should have light, surface tillings five to eight other times during the season. Potatoes are planted in “drills” or continuous furrows, 27 to 42 inches apart, at intervals of 9 to 18 inches, and it requires from 8 to 18 bushels of potatoes to plant an acre. Most farmers plant too sparingly. There has been much book discussion as to the size of seed cuttings, but the most economical size is one weighing about three ounces or the size of a large hen’s egg, with at least one good eye. The potato cutting is food; therefore the larger the cutting the more food, and the more food the better early growth, and the better the early growth the better the yield. Bailey claims that a piece containing too many eyes means too many sprouts contending for that food and each weakening the other in the struggle for its own existence. For early potatoes, the only ones that can pay in a small plot, remember five different things: (1) good site and an early soil; (2) land prepared either by special plowing the fall before, or by growing late-tilled crops, that the soil may be in good tilth; (3) free use of concentrated, quick-acting fertilizers; (4) early varieties of potatoes; (5) sprouting the sets, so that the short, thick, firm, colored shoots are secured. To secure these, light and a moderate degree of warmth, 40°-50°, is needed. Nothing pays better than sprouting. No crop needs spraying more. Unless it is frequently sprayed, it is almost certain to be attacked by the potato bug, the flea-beetle and blight, and the yield cut down. Dry Paris green puffed on while the leaves are damp with dew, ends the troubles of the bug, and Bordeaux mixture can be sprayed for blight. No specific has yet been discovered for the flea-beetle, but it does far less damage where Bordeaux mixture is freely used. I have heard of letting the chickens loose on the flea-beetles. SWEET POTATOES.