74 Rkpobt of the Botanist of thb 



■noh a manner as to make it unnecessary for the horse to walk 

 In the furrow. 



Once started, the job was not a difficult one. Mr. Kelly esti- 

 mates that by using the ditches as starting points the expense of 

 the work would be about |80 per acre. 



This turning of the soil was done in the autumn of 1898. In 

 1899 the field was sowed with onions, and in spite of the fact 

 that the crop was somewhat injured by drought, owing to the 

 looseness of the new soil, the owner estimates that the increased 

 yield on this one crop repaid him for doing the work. There was 

 little if any injury from smut. The land was plowed shallow in 

 the fall of 1899 and again sowed with onions in 1900. At the time 

 of our visit, May 31, there was a prospect of a full stand of onions 

 and only occasionally a plant showing smut. However, this small 

 amouat of smut still left in the soil will increase from year to year 

 until after some years it will be necessary to repeat the operation. 

 Theni the question will arise. Are the smut spores in the deep- 

 luried soil still alive? If they are it will do little good to turn 

 the soil back to the surface again; but this point can be deter- 

 mined only by an experiment. 



transplantino. 



More than ten years ago Dr. Thaxter^ made the important dis- 

 covery that smut can get into the onion plant only while the 

 plant is very small. At the same time he observed that trans- 

 planted seedlings were free from smut. Six years later his suc- 

 cessor. Dr. Sturgifi,^ made some experiments to determine if smut 

 can be circumvented by germinating the onion seeds in soil free 

 from smut and transplanting the plants into the field after they 

 have become large enough to resist the attacks of the smut fun- 

 gus. This was found to be true. It was shown that seedling 

 onion plants reared in smut-free soil can be transplanted into 

 •mutty soil without contracting the disease. Here, then, is a 



*U c, pp. 145-146. 



•SturgU, W. O. Nineteenth Ann. Rep. Conn. Agr. Exp. Sta., 1895: 176- 

 182. 



