Irrigating Vegetables in New York 1355 



seed iii dry weather, when they transplant plants and as crops 

 near maturity. It always pays to have products to market when 

 the other fellow has none, and judicious application of water will 

 very frequently enable a man to make his regular sales while 

 his neighbors are devoting most of their time to praying for rain. 

 Prices are usually highly favorable at such times. 



Viewing the case from another standpoint, we are further con- 

 vinced of the value of irrigation. The vegetable man invests in 

 land, in labor, in fertilizing material, and any other factors which 

 make for heavy yields. It frequently happens that his return 

 from these investments is jeopardized or lost through his inability 

 to control the moisture factor. He may do much by leaving his 

 land rough through winter to prevent run-off, by harrowing fre- 

 quently until planting time, by maintaining an effective mulch 

 throughout the season — but even so, through sheer absence of 

 moisture to be conserved, his whole crop may be lost, or so much 

 of it that he might better have left the ground implanted. 



On the other hand, irrigation is not a panacea. It does not 

 relieve the grower of the necessity of good drainage and careful 

 cultivation. The former is a ^precaution against over-watering by 

 means of his artificial system or by means of heavy rains which 

 may come just after a thorough irrigation. The latter saves Water 

 which is costly and helps to keep the soil in better physical condi- 

 tion. The man who invests his money in the improvement of 

 most of the growth factors and then invests more money in irri- 

 gation, but who neglects a single additional factor which limits the 

 crop return, is worse off than if he had never heard of irrigation. 

 He loses the cost of irrigation in addition to other costs. 



Many growers can give very inspiring figures as to the results 

 they have obtained by means of irrigation. A ]STew Jersey pro- 

 ducer has secured yields of as much as six hundred and twenty 

 bushels of potatoes from an acre. The same planter was able to 

 mature a $1,500 crop of onions from a five-acre held in time to 

 permit the setting of a later crop of celery. Another grower re- 

 ports that an outlay of three or four hundred dollars saved sev- 

 eral thousand dollars worth of celery, whereas an unwatered acre 

 and a half was a complete failure. The Ontario Agricultural 

 College reports experiments with lettuce as follows : 



