THE ONION CROP. 193 



have been weeded twice, they have got to be pretty good size, 

 you think you have got through your weeding pretty well 

 and can go haying, and feel very comfortable about it. You 

 go to haying, and after you get through, you will find purs- 

 lane so thick that you will be astonished. Here is another 

 implement which I have made, for there are none in the mar- 

 ket, for the purpose of weeding. It is an implement similar 

 to the truckle hoe I exhibited before, but with taller wheels, 

 and it is so arranged with small ploughshares that you can set 

 it narrower or wider as you wish, and by running it carefully 

 straddle of the row, you throw a little furrow up on each 

 side of the onions, or carrots, or beets, or whatever you have, 

 and throw a little dirt upon the small weeds and kill them. 

 But you may ask, "Will not the piling up of the earth kill 

 the vegetable ? " The vegetable must be large enough, so that 

 throwing up the furrow will not cover the eye of it. The 

 dirt should be thrown up so as to hill up the vegetable slightly. 

 Then, in a week or a little more, when the small weeds have 

 been killed and others have started again, just reverse it and 

 throw the furrow back again away from the vegetable, and you 

 do a day's weeding with this machine in a very short time, by 

 simply walking along. It does the work very well, and at a 

 season when you cannot well spare the time to do it in any 

 other way, — just as haying begins. 



The onions are now, we will say, weeded sufficiently, and 

 if the seed is right, if the manure is right and the land is 

 right, in a little while the tops will begin to droop prepara- 

 tory to ripening off. But if you have made a mistake, if 

 your seed is not very good, if the manure you have used was 

 a little too green, or if the land where you have sowed your 

 crop has not been prepared properly by previous cultivation, 

 and by reason of this the onions are stiff-necked, proud, 

 haughty, will not yield to circumstances, and they stand bolt 

 upright, you must overcome them. Take an empty flour 

 barrel with two heads, and a hole bored through the centre of 

 each, with a hoe handle for an axle-tree and a handle on each 

 side, and use it like a wheelbarrow, walking over "the field of 

 onions and breaking down the stiff-necked ones, and then they 

 will be inclined to ripen off. They will not be so perfect as 

 they would if the tops had fallen naturally, but they will be 



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