612 Agricultural Experiment Station, Ithaca, N. Y. 



the bearing kind.* It is not every mare which will breed or every 

 hen which will lay a hatfull of eggs. 



In my own practice, I am buying the best nursery grown stock of 

 apples (mostly Spy), and am top-grafting them with scions from 

 trees which please me and which I know to have been productive 

 during many years. Time will discover if the effort is worth the 

 while, but unless all analogies fail the outcome must be to my profit. 



II. SOME REFLECTIONS UPON WEEDS. 



The one deplorable fact in the minds of most farmers is the 

 existence of weeds. From the time the boy is old enough to vent 

 his energy in the smothered carrot bed, he is everywhere and al- 

 ways impressed with the fact that he must hoe to kill weeds. 

 From youth to old age the burden is upon his mind and back. 

 "Writers of agricultural literature have taken up the wail, and have 

 drawn it out to disproportionate lengths by specifying long lists of 

 plants which are often weedy intruders, and by describing their 

 habits and migrations in vivid detail. The truth is that weeds 

 always have been and still are the closest friends and helpmates of 

 the farmer. It was they which first taught the lesson of tillage of the 

 soil, and it is they which never allow the lesson, now that it has 

 been partly learned, to be forgotten. The one only and sovereign 

 remedy for them is the very tillage which they have introduced. 

 When their mission is finally matured, therefore, they will disap- 

 pear because there will be no place in which they can grow. It 

 would be a great calamity if they were now to disappear from the 

 earth, for the greater number of farmers still need the discipline 

 which they enforce. Probably not one farmer in ten would till his 

 lands well if it were not for these painstaking schoolmasters, and 

 many of them would not till at all. Until farmers till for tillage 

 sake, and not to kill the weeds, it is necessary that the weeds shall 

 exist ; but when farmers do till for tillage sake, then weeds will 

 disappear with no effort of ours. Catalogues of all the many 

 iniquities of weeds with the details given in mathematical exactness, 

 and all the botanical names added, are of no avail. If one is to talk 

 about weeds he should confine himself to methods of improving the 

 farming. The weeds can take care of themselves. 



* This subject was presented by the writer to the American Association of 

 Nurserymen at the meeting in Indianapolis last June. 



