94 



CIVIC BIOLOGY 



tubers from weak hills of the same variety. Little, however, 

 has been done by way of recording the yields of single hills; 

 Grubb gives 16 tubers, weighing 8 pounds, as the ideal hill 

 in field culture. Perry Nathan Pickett, aged twelve years, in 



connection with his industrial 

 project work in Salem, Ore- 

 gon, in 1914, produced a rec- 

 ord hill of Burbank potatoes, 

 containing 1 3 large and 2 small 

 tubers, weighing 16 pounds. 

 A record hill from Lexington, 

 Oregon, yielded 24 pounds, 

 and Carl Gabrielson, aged 

 eleven, Puyallup, Washing- 

 ton, has reported a volunteer 

 hill in his school garden 

 that dug 103 potatoes, rang- 

 ing from 12 ounces to the size 

 of a hen's egg and weighing 

 40 pounds 12 ounces. If we 

 know how to raise one hill 

 best, we may extend this 

 knowledge to any number 

 of hills. Hence, for an ele- 

 mentary standard unit the 

 single plant will be a more 

 usable one than the plot or 

 acre. Any boy can find a 

 place to raise one or ten hills 

 of potatoes ; he may try a different experiment on each hill, 

 and thus learn more from a single hill than he might from 

 an acre. The same is true of a single plant of wheat, corn, 

 tomato, cabbage, lettuce, strawberry, blackberry, raspberry, 

 grape, peach, apple, pear, rose, lily, or anything else. 



FIG. 47. Growth race between potatoes 



Potatoes weighed 186.7 and 9.8 g. At end 

 of fifty-eight days the roots had grown 

 8640 ft. and 155 ft. respectively. Photo- 

 graph by Frances W. Tufts 



