88 ONIONS FOR PROFIT. 



With the advantage which we secure to the onion plants 

 over weed growth by early sowing, and by a crowding 

 which leaves little room for weeds to start later, the task of 

 hand weeding will not be formidable. The wheel hoe should 

 be brought early and promptly into use, and the weeds in the 

 rows pulled up by hand whenever and as often as required 

 until the crop is well on its way toward maturity. 



When the majority of the tops have died down, which 

 here is usually at the beginning of July, the time for har- 

 vesting the crop has come. If the area is small, pulling by 

 hand may answer, and very small boys even can be em- 

 ployed to do this work satisfactorily. A better and quicker 

 way, however, is to run a common, good-sized garden 

 trowel under the onions, lengthwise of the row, lifting up 

 trowelful after trowelful, and throwing them into a sieve 

 with meshes just small enough to hold the smallest of the 

 bulbs. An ordinary ccal-ash sifter is good enough. Sift 

 out the sand and dirt, then empty the cleaned onions into 

 baskets or boxes, and strew thinly on a dry floor to cure. 



If the grower prefers to cure the crop outdoors, which, 

 at that season of hot and dry weather, is a perfectly safe 

 proceeding, the bulbs should be dug up in the simplest and 

 most convenient manner, and left right on the ground until 

 the tops and roots have completely dried away. We ordi- 

 narily have used our narrow-bladed, home-made onion hoes 

 for digging out the bulbs. The blade should be inserted 

 and drawn along in the row just under the bulbs. The 

 Planet Jr. wheel hoe is provided with an attachment — the 

 onion-set harvester, here illustrated (Fig. 42) — which does 

 the work with neatness and dispatch. Any grower of ordi- 

 nary intelligence and mechanical skill, however, can easily 

 construct a serviceable tool for harvesting pickling onions 

 and onion sets from a set of old cultivator wheels, a few 

 pieces of board, and a piece of an old saw-blade. The illus- 



