CHAPTER VII. 

 CULTIVATION. 



The timely and thorough performance of the several acts 

 which, in accordance with the prevailing local conditions, constitute 

 good tillage, are indispensable to success in California vegetable 

 growing. No matter how favorable the natural conditions or how 

 generous the other provisions made by the grower, to be dilatory 

 or slack in cultivation is to seriously endanger, if not to actually 

 forfeit, the final reward. 



The American pioneers were quick to see that the energetic 

 use of the good tools to which they had been trained in their old 

 homes would bring marvelous production from lands previously 

 held at grazing value, and, beginning with this assurance, they pro- 

 ceeded by lessons of observation and experience until they learned 

 proper times and ways of working under the novel natural condi- 

 tions which surrounded them. They also accomplished modifica- 

 tions in tools for tillage, which, from a local point of view, are 

 notable improvements, and they devised new forms to meet special 

 conditions or purposes. By this empirical method they ministered 

 to their own success and incidentally demonstrated the truth of some 

 advanced theories of tillage which had won but slight recognition 

 from the conservative spirit of the older countries. It is an inter- 

 esting fact also that prevailing California practice, in some import- 

 ant regards, accords more closely with principles deduced from 

 elaborate experimentation by the most acute and patient students 

 of soil physics, than does the common practice of older countries. 

 It is in some sense a grim satisfaction for Californians to feel that 

 critics who have denounced some California tillage practices as 

 slack and unthrifty, not only do not know our conditions but are 

 not aware that their own practices are in contravention of general 

 principles with which ours closely agree. 



With tillage, as with other gardening duties to which refer- 

 ence has been made, there are in California wider extremes to be 

 mastered, and methods are therefore strikingly diverse. Tillage 

 prepares the seed bed, facilitates germination and root-extension, 

 and fosters the benign processes of soil warmth and aeration, here 

 as elsewhere. It also holds the same relation to soil-moisture here 

 as elsewhere, but its services in this particular are more conspicuous 

 because the need is greater, as intimated in previous chapter. 



The common California conception of the value of tillage natu- 

 rally seizes upon this aspect of the case and asserts that the chief 

 offices of soil working are first to get as much moisture as possible 

 into the soil and, second, to keep it there. The efficacy of certain 

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