156 CALIFORNIA VEGETABLES. 



GROWTH FROM SEED IN OPEN GROUND. 



Adequate heat and moisture are essential to germina- 

 tion and subsequent growth. The preceding chapter has 

 shown at what times these factors are present in California 

 soil, either by nature or artifice of the planter. Heat is 

 always adequate for the germination of the seed of com- 

 mon vegetables, in well-drained surface soil in the Cali- 

 fornia valley regions. Even in our frosty weather, the 

 day temperature of the soil is adequate for germination 

 except, perhaps, during the colder storms and seldom does 

 our rain have too low a temperature. Even in this it is 

 not so much the matter of germination as of conditions 

 inhospitable to the subsequent grow r th of the germs. It 

 makes little practical difference, perhaps, whether the 

 seed is killed or the germ perishes after starting. But the 

 death of either seed or germ is more often due to moisture 

 lack or excess, than to temperature conditions. For this 

 reason a sowing may go for naught if seeding is done in 

 the fall without thorough moistening of the soil by irriga- 

 tion or rainfall, or the same disappointment may follow 

 sowing even seed of hardy plants in certain localities in 

 December and January in years of heavy rainfall. For 

 these reasons it is all-important that the vegetable grower 

 should carefully observe his local conditions of soil heat 

 and moisture and arrive at proper deductions from his 

 own experience as to what acts he should perform under 

 his ruling local conditions and the peculiar phases of the 

 weather of the particular year in which he is acting. And 

 then a vegetable grower, in garden practice, which in- 

 volves succession of small areas, must be enterprisingly 

 venturesome. He must take some chances of losing a sow- 

 ing or planting and of renewing it, and he should always 

 keep adequate supplies of seeds or seedlings at hand. It 

 is a great deal better to lose a sowing than to set up some 

 arbitrary dead-sure date for sowing; for with such a 

 policy he will never have anything early, and perhaps 

 never anything profitable. Field work for staple vege- 



