EARLY PLANTING IN DRY REGIONS. 11 



quality. And even if no other change of characters takes place, ex- 

 periments at San Antonio, Tex., in 1906 showed that the checking of 

 the growth of an early planting may render it actually later in the 

 development of its crop than a later planting of the same variety in 

 the same place. Later planting not only secured more cotton, but a 

 larger part of the crop was ripened before a given date, in spite of 

 the fact that the plantings were made side by side, so that the later 

 rows were readily accessible to the boll weevils bred in the early 

 rows. 1 



That the same result w r ould be obtained in all cases is not to be 

 expected, for these experiments were made under dry-weather condi- 

 tions. But in the season of 1906 the summer drought was not severe 

 enough to stop the reproduction of the weevils, all the plantings be- 

 ing quite seriously infested. The later plantings might have shown 

 still greater superiority if they had been isolated from the early 

 plantings, but in that case there could have been no assurance that 

 other conditions of soil and moisture were the same. 



If very early planting could insure a correspondingly early har- 

 vest, it might be argued that cotton should always be planted at the 

 earliest possible date, without reference to scarcity or abundance of 

 weevils. But in view of the experiments mentioned above, showing 

 that later plantings may overtake very early plantings and ripen an 

 earlier crop, it is plain that early planting, like any other cultural 

 expedient, must be used with discretion and not carried to an un- 

 practical extreme. 



Of course, it is only in regions subject to drought that the weevils 

 can be expected to become less destructive as the season advances, but 

 in the dry regions of southern and western Texas this consideration 

 seems to be of practical importance. Fields planted in May some- 

 times mature a full crop before being invaded at all by the weevils, 

 even in localities where fields planted in March have suffered quite 

 severely. Though such complete immunity of late plantings from 

 Aveevil injuries may be of rare occurrence, the fact that good crops 

 are sometimes secured in this way often leads the farmer to take the 

 chance of a late sowing of cotton after a winter crop has been har- 

 vested or after some other spring crop has failed. The possibilities 

 of late planting are obviously of much more importance in regions 

 where winter crops can be grown than in more northern localities 

 where the growing season is only long enough for the cotton and 

 winter crops are not used, at least on land that is to be planted to 

 cotton. 



A heavy infestation of boll weevils in the early part of the season 

 interferes with the growth of the plants long before the fruiting 



1 See " Local Adjustment of Cotton Varieties," Bulletin 159, Bureau of Plant In- 

 dustry, U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, 1909, p. 49. 

 220 



