106 VERMONT AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



times afford this, but as crops are ordinarily managed, the 

 full amount is seldom obtained in this way. Cultivation, per- 

 sistent shallow cultivation of growing- crops, goes far to ren- 

 der the maximum possible. The writer saw in a California 

 valley in July, 1899, luxuriant fields and orchards, decked in 

 vivid green, on which no rain had fallen for a hundred days 

 and to which not a drop of water had been added by irriga- 

 tion. The earth mulch or dust blanket lay all over the farm 

 and was maintained by frequent tillage. Below it, two 

 inches or so down, the earth was moist with capillary water, 

 stopped there at the root levels by the husbandman's direc- 

 tion. Near by was a hard baked soil, which, unfilled and un- 

 cropped, had lost its water and was practically a desert. The 

 Bible tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to halt in the 

 skies. On this California farm the work of the sun was 

 halted, so far as it was adetriment, by the application of the 

 teachings of physical science to practical farm affairs. 



"And the desert shall blossom as the rose." Care should 

 be taken not to cultivate deeply, lest the roots and root hairs 

 be broken. This is worse than no cultivation, as the plant's 

 water pipes are thus destroyed. Shallow tillage, oft repeated 

 is the receipt to use when conditions do not favor the furnish- 

 ing of a maximum amount of water to a crop in the right 

 form and at the right time. 



6. Tillage should be used to kill weeds; not because they 

 arc such, but because they rob other plants of food and drink. 

 The writer heartily seconds the resolution offered some time 

 ago by a New York man : Resolved that weeds are a great 

 blessing to the intelligent farmer. Weeds in the tillage land 

 have stirred many a man to cultivation, who otherwise 

 would have neglected this duty ; and this neglect would have 

 entailed a shortened crop, because the five beneficent effects 

 already cited in this article would not have been brought 

 about. Weeds are guilty and should suffer death, not because 

 they are plants out of place, which after all is the true defini- 

 tion of a weed, but because they consume the water and plant 

 food belonging to the crop. They are robbers — sometimes 

 murderers — and should die. In the pasture or the mowing 

 the weed problem is a serious one, but not in the tillage land. 

 The farmer who fails to kill them makes the double error of 

 fostering robbers and failing to better his soil ; he who culti- 

 vates, kills them and improves the chances of his crop in at 

 least six different ways, by adding to the available plant 

 food, by helping the soil breathe, by promoting bacterial life, 

 by enlarging the chance of root development, by saving soil 

 water and by translocating from lower soil layers the best of 

 the plant food they contain. 



