COTTON IN WEEVIL-CONTROL EXPERIMENTS 23 
A SEPARATE LATE PLANTING AT SAN ANTONIO 
A separate late planting of cotton was also made at San Antonio 
on May 12, the same date as the last of the consecutive adjacent 
plantings and from the same stock of seed. The surface soil had 
dried, but by using broad sweeps in front of the planter drill the seed 
was dropped in moist earth. Germination was rapid, and a fairly 
good stand of plants was obtained, although most of the rows had 
a few skips due to imperfect germination. Most of the seed in these 
skips germinated following a rain on May 30, but the seedlings were 
weak and most of them died or remained stunted. The location of 
this planting with relation to other fields of cotton on the experiment 
farm is shown in Figure 1. ; 
CLOSE SPACING IN LATE PLANTINGS 
The tendency of late-planted cotton to produce a large “rank”’ 
type of stalk under certain conditions renders it desirable to leave 
the plants closer together in the rows, in order to suppress excessive 
vegetative growth. Plants which grow large require a longer season 
to mature a crop, and when the season is shortened by late planting 
overgrown plants are an added disadvantage. 
The principle of controlling the vegetative growth of plants by 
spacing the plants closer in the rows has been tested under a wide 
range of conditions. Equal or greater yields have usually been 
obtained from close-spaced plants when tested in direct comparison 
with wide-spaced plants. A greater degree of earliness is usually 
obtained by close spacing. In open stands with the plants averag- 
ing from 2 to 4 inches apart in the row, larger yields have been 
obtained without thinning. 
In order to test the effect of close spacing when cotton is planted 
late, this experiment was planned as a comparison of plants chopped 
to two plants in a hill with plants left unthinned in the rows. The 
test consisted of three 4-row blocks of each spacing, the unthinned 
blocks alternating with the blocks of thinned plants. The outside 
blocks were protected by guard rows. 
The plant spacing used in comparison with the unthinned blocks 
was the same as that used in the time-of-planting test, two plants 
being left in hills with the hills 12 inches apart. Thinning was done 
in these rows on June 15, when the plants averaged about 8 inches 
in height and had from six to eight nodes. 
OVERWINTERED WEEVILS AVOIDED 
Although the late-planted cotton was examined at frequent inter- 
vals for indications of weevil infestation, no trace of weevil injury 
was found during June. 
The fact that infestation from overwintered weevils was avoided 
in the separate late planting probably was due to hot dry weather 
during the first part of June. During this period the plants were 
small and had not yet formed squares, so that if weevils came in 
they had little protection against the high temperatures and did not 
survive to attack the squares when they had reached sufficient size 
to enable the weevils to begin breeding. Thus, it appeared that 
the planting of May 12 had been sufficiently late to avoid infesta- 
tion from overwintered weevils under the conditions encountered at 
San Antonio. 
