PREVENTION AND ERADICATION OF WEEDS 47 



these broken pieces are left in the soil after ploughing the 

 field will shortly be covered with far more of the perennial 

 weeds than were present in the first instance. An excellent 

 instance of this was seen by the writer in the summer of 1918 

 on a neglected farm in Suffolk. The arable land had been 

 getting into poor condition for some years, and in 1916 an 

 attempt was made to work some of the fields with the steam 

 plough. For some reason no after-cultivation of any kind was 

 carried out, and in August, 1918, it was covered with a dense 

 rank herbage consisting almost entirely of " water grass " 

 (Agrostis or twitch), together with an army of curled docks that 

 were seeding freely. The condition of the land thus treated 

 was so hopeless that even the farmers of the neighbourhood, 

 experienced in dealing with that particular type of soil, con- 

 fessed themselves unable to tackle the problem of reducing the 

 chaos to a semblance of order. This is a practical demonstra- 

 tion of the necessity of following the plough with other imple- 

 ments which will gather up the fragments of perennial weeds in 

 order that they may be collected and destroyed. Repeated 

 harrowing after ploughing serves the double purpose of collect- 

 ing these weeds and of reducing the soil to the fine tilth most 

 favourable to germination. This in itself is a valuable aid to 

 weed eradication. The soil is full of weed seeds and the good 

 tilth encourages them to .germinate rapidly, and it is an easy 

 matter to destroy the delicate seedlings by further cultivation, 

 so disposing of some proportion of the stores of buried seeds. 

 If it is not necessary to sow the crop immediately this process 

 can be repeated, as each cultivation of the surface maintains 

 a good seed bed for the germination of the weeds. 



Even after the crops are sown and are well through the 

 soil it is possible to destroy the weed seedlings by using the 

 appropriate farm implements. Special machines have been 

 invented to meet this need, and the Poppy Destroyer and the 

 American Weeder 1 are but two of the various types employed. 

 Among some crops it is possible to run the horse-hoe, but 

 under special circumstances, where a particular weed is trouble- 

 some and labour is available, the surface cultivation is carried 

 out with the hand-hoe. When the crops become too high to 

 admit of the passage of any cultivator it is necessary to 

 resort to hand pulling for the removal of the larger weeds, 

 and if necessary the hand-hoe can be kept going for some 

 time longer. Large individual weeds, as thistles, that cannot 



1 Long, H. C. (1910), " Common Weeds of the Farm and Garden," pp. 34-35. 



