The crop is taken off with headers, as is usual in this State.
For the second year's crop the land is plowed.

A two-share gang-plow is used, with a seat for the plowman.

It is drawn by four horses, who have to be shod with broad wooden shoes, usually made of ash plank, nine by eleven inches, fastened to the iron shoes of the horse by screws.
The soil does not appear to be sour, and no doubt the ashes from the burning off do much to sweeten it where it needs that.

But several years are needed to reduce the ground to its best condition for tillage, and the difference in this respect between newly-burned or second-crop lands and such matured farms as that of Mr.Bigelow on Sherman Island--who has been there eight or nine years--is very striking.
It seemed to me that the farmers and land-owners with whom I spoke knew "for certain" but very little about the best ways to manage these lands, and that the advice of a thorough scientific agriculturist, like Professor Johnson of Yale, would be very valuable to them.

Now, they know only that the land when burned over will bear large crops of wheat; and, of course, in all practical measures for economically putting in and taking off a wheat crop the Californian needs no instructor.
The soil seemed to me, so far as they dig into it--say six feet deep--to be, not peat, but a mass of undecayed or but partly decayed roots, strongly adhering together, so that the upper part of a levee, taken of course from the lowest part of the ditch, lay in firm sods or tussocks.
These, however, seem to decay pretty rapidly on exposure to the air.
The drainage is not usually deeper than four feet, and in places the water-level was but three feet below the surface.