SEED GROWING. 127 



tion there will always be a few off plants, and these must 

 come out to keep the stock pure. 



One Use of Machinery. Improved cleaning machinery 

 has proved an important factor in the production of a 

 bright, fresh-looking sample of seed, and has improved the 

 vitality test by allowing a thorough separation of every- 

 thing spurious from the good seed. Hand mills are em- 

 ployed to some extent for small lots, but the main cleaning 

 is done with large Clipper Mills, operated by gasoline en- 

 gines, and sometimes the electric motor is used. This 

 gives a steadier power and a much larger capacity. It 

 was not until a few years ago that onion seed could be 

 successfully threshed and separated by one of the same 

 mills. After years of experimenting and great expense, 

 one was built that could successfully do this, and now 

 onion seed is threshed and cleaned by large mills run with 

 steam engines. It is, however, still necessary to sink the 

 seed in water to get it perfectly clean. 



Hand Labor. Nothing has been invented for threshing 

 lettuce, cabbage, parsnip, parsley, etc., which is any im-' 

 provement on the hand flail, .and gangs of men are em- 

 ployed in threshing these crops. The diversity of the 

 crops and the innumerable variety would make it natu- 

 rally unprofitable to attempt to employ machinery in the 

 field for these kinds of seed. 



The seed grower must depend upon a great deal of hand 

 work. Everything must be harvested by hand; every 

 onion head must be cut by hand; every stalk of lettuce 

 and carrot must be dried, turned, threshed, cleaned and 

 recleaned. Carrot seed must not only be flailed to thresh 

 it, but it must also be run through a rubbing machine to 

 break the beards off and then cleaned in-doors. 



All the planting and cultivating must be done very 

 carefully, and much of it is hand work. Every onion bulb 

 must be set right side up in the row, then carefully cov- 

 ered, or left for a time in the open drill af*:r setting if 

 there should be danger of soil saturation from heavy rains 



