36 GARDEN FARMING 



to use machinery, but with such crops as spinach, beets, radishes, 

 turnips, and all of the small seed crops, which are planted in 

 drills, it is much cheaper and more satisfactory to plant them 

 by machinery than by hand. If very accurate results are desired, 

 however, it is never safe to depend on machinery. Where care- 

 ful experimental records are to be taken into consideration, it is 

 necessary to plant the seeds by hand. 



In seed sowing one must be thoroughly familiar with the re- 

 quirements of the crop in hand. Some seeds must be sown deep 

 while others should scarcely be covered. The depth to plant is 

 governed by the nature of the crop and by the size and vitality 

 of the seed. Whatever the depth of planting, the object in cov- 

 ering the seed should be to bring the soil into close contact with 

 the seed as soon as it has been planted. This is of special 

 importance in localities where precipitation is scanty. The tend- 

 ency of the seed drill is to open the furrow and allow the earth 

 to fall loosely over the seeds after they have been dropped. The 

 soil then becomes compacted and closely surrounds the seed 

 only after a considerable length of time, unless some mechanical 

 means is resorted to for compacting the soil over the seed. Appre- 

 ciating the importance of compacting the soil by artificial means, 

 Peter Henderson first demonstrated such an operation by the illus- 

 tration of a man walking from end to end of a row, after the seeds 

 had been scattered and covered by hand, placing one foot directly 

 in front of the other. This tramping of the soil immediately over 

 the seeds accomplished what has been insisted upon under the 

 discussion of subsurface packing of the soil ; that is, it restored 

 the capillary relations between the surface layers of the soil and 

 those immediately beneath it, so that a direct current of water was 

 established between the lower layers and the surface of the soil, 

 thus bringing the earth close to the seeds, and the water where 

 the seeds could immediately absorb it. Under these conditions, 

 even in the driest places and during protracted droughts, seeds 

 can be made to germinate readily and a good stand of plants can 

 be obtained. This compacting of the soil, which was illustrated by 

 Henderson, has been taken advantage of in the manufacture of 

 seed drills for garden as well as for farm operations. Such drills 

 are provided with a wheel or roller following the drill point. The 



