78 GARDENING WITH BRAINS 



I have often denounced this vegetable mos- 

 quito, as it might be called, but it continues to 

 multiply and flourish just as if I had never said 

 a word against it. It is the chief cause of 

 deserted farms, for it makes tilling the soil ten 

 times as hard. I am not exaggerating. 



During the war I read a little story about a 

 score of American soldiers who, seeing a broken- 

 down French peasant trying to till his field after 

 the Teutonic devastation, came to his aid with 

 their trenching implements. I wish I could hire 

 twoscore soldiers to spend a week cleaning out 

 the tangled witch-grass roots in my half-acre 

 garden. Plows, harrows, hoes, forks, rakes, 

 combs, and sieves would be needed but would 

 they do the job? Can witch grass be killed? 

 It recalls the man in one of Mozart's operas who 

 was condemned to be beheaded, then hung, then 

 impaled on hot stakes and finally flayed alive. 



However, do not despair. There are ways of 

 killing witch grass. If you will send five cents 

 (not in stamps) to the Superintendent of Docu- 

 ments at Washington for Farmers' Bulletin 

 No. 279 he will mail you a pamphlet entitled 

 A Method of Eradicating Johnson Grass. 

 In it you will learn and see it proved by 

 photographs that witch grass has not one 

 rootstock only, like decent plants, but three 

 the primary, the secondary, and the tertiary; 

 and that the tertiary ones sometimes horribile 

 dictu! penetrate to a depth of four feet 



