1873.] 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
295 
yesterday with his wife, and stopped a moment 
to remark : “ You ought to write a piece in the 
Agriculturist about these thistles—these Canada 
thistles—that are growing on the Squire’s farm 
as well as on the Deacon’s.” As lie drove off, 
I heard him mutter to his wife in a tone of dis¬ 
gust, “ Twenty-five thousand dollars for 160 
acres.”- He referred to a run-down farm in the 
neighborhood that would be well worth the 
money asked for it provided it was drained and 
clean, but which in its present condition will 
not pay the interest on $50 per acre. 
It amused me, however, to be told to “ write 
a piece” for the Agriculturist on killing weeds. 
Nothing would please me better. I have weeds 
on the brain. I think about weeds, talk about 
weeds, and dream about weeds. If I had to 
“ write a piece ” I would certainly select weeds. 
If I had to preach a sermon the text would 
probably be; “I went by the field bf the sloth’ 
ful and by the vineyard of the man void of un¬ 
derstanding; and, lo, it was ali grown over 
with thorns, and nettles had covered the face 
thereof.*’ I think the Squire would give up his 
pew, and the Deacon would suggest the next 
morning that “ there was some dissatisfaction 
in the church, and that it -was thought a change 
of climate would be good for me.” Write a 
piece about weeds ! What was the old gentle¬ 
man thinking about ? Does he want to buy my 
farm? Does he want this neighborhood to be¬ 
come too hot for me ? The Deacon has already 
threatened to “ write a piece ” for the Agricul¬ 
turist pointing out the weak spots in my system 
of farming. The Deacon has been talking the 
matter over with some of the neighbors. Last 
fall I had two or three hundred bushels of man¬ 
gels frozen in the ground. This is to be one of 
the charges. They forget that I saved three 
thousand bushels. Then I had half an acre of 
turnips frozen in the ground. But I saved four 
or five acres that would yield eight or nine hun¬ 
dred bushels per acre. The charge in brief is, 
“ He knows how to raise good crops, but does 
not know how to take care of them.” This is 
letting me off pretty easy. I could make out a 
better case. On the whole, I think I will follow 
the old gentleman’s advice, and write a “piece” 
about weeds. The weather is very hot, and 
“composing” is hard work, but I will try my 
hand at a short “ composition.” 
“ A weed is a plant growing where you do 
not want it to grow. Thistles are not weeds 
when grown, as they are in France, to make 
perfume. The thistles growing in the Deacon’s 
wheat are weeds. He does not want them 
there. If you have six plants of corn in a hill 
where you only want four two of them are 
weeds. A dead weed is not a weed. A grow¬ 
ing weed pumps up water out of the ground. 
The weeds in an acre of the Deacon’s clover 
pump up more water in a day than all his ani¬ 
mals drink in a month. Weeds propagate 
faster than rats. I have got more rats than the 
Deacon, but the Deacon beats me on weeds. 
The boys shoot the rats. Yesterday they shot 
twc and scared away a dozen. Next year they 
wil come back again. The Deacon kills a hun¬ 
dred of his weeds and buries a thousand. Next 
spring they will come up by the million. You 
can’t get rid of weeds unless you kill them. If 
you do not kill them they will kill you. They 
are worse than foot-rot in sheep. They spread 
faster than caterpillars on currant-bushes, or 
than the canker-worms on apple-trees. Some 
of the orchards in this neighborhood look as 
though they had been sprinkled over with kero¬ 
sene and set fire to. The worms have eaten off 
every leaf. Some farmers keep off the insects 
by putting tar bands round the trunks of the 
trees in spring ; some don’t. They think it is 
no use fighting the worms. Some farmers 
think it is no use killing the weeds. It is natu¬ 
ral for the soil to produce weeds. They say 
you can't kill them. The Deacon does not say 
weeds can’t be killed, but he does not try to kill 
them. He hoes his corn. I don’t hoe my corn. 
I hoe the weeds. I would kill the weeds if 
there was no corn. 
I am not sure that the 
Deacon would. The 
Deacon never sum¬ 
mer - fallows. He 
never fall-fallows. He 
never tries to make the weeds grow. He tries to 
smother them up for a few months. He does not 
kill the roots. He does not make the weed-seeds 
grow and tlieu kill the young plants. The 
weeds on his farm are getting worse and worse. 
My farm used to be worse than his ; now some 
of it is cleaner than his. I am fighting the 
weeds. He lets them grow, and is waiting foi 
something to turn up. There are thousands of 
farmers doing the same thing. 1 lie weeds cost 
us more than all our state, national, and local 
taxes; more than all our schools, churches, and 
newspapers. They are more expensive than 
cuildren’s boots and 
ladies’ bonnets. They 
are as bad as cigars 
and fast horses. The 
horse may break his 
neck, and you will get 
rid of him; but the weeds will stick tighter than 
.a mortgage, and run up faster than compound 
interest or a grocery bill. They are like bad 
habits. You must not tamper with them. No 
half-way measures will answer. The only way 
to stop using tobacco is to stop. The only way 
to kill weeds is to kill them.” 
I hope the old gentleman will be pleased with 
my “composition.” I hope when he visits this 
neighborhood again he will find fewer weeds. 
Land worth $150 per acre ought to produce 
something better than thistles, red-root, quack- 
grass, and chess. 
-- < -a O --- —- 
Preparing for Hedge-rows. 
We have recently had an opportunity of in¬ 
specting hundreds of hedge-rows and many 
miles of newly-plant¬ 
ed hedges or newly- 
broken prairie on 
which it is intended 
to plant hedges. It 
is quite safe to say that less than one in a 
hundred of the existing hedges are of any use 
as barriers against stock of any kind, and that 
the same proportion of hedges newly planted 
promise no better results. This may be thought 
to be an excessively severe judgment, but it is 
a deliberate one, and 
we feel sure it will 
be sustained by the 
results. In the first 
place, the planting 
has been imperfect; 
then the care of the 
hedge has been neg¬ 
lectful; there has been 
a sad want of training; and the result is that 
most of the hedges consist of a row of spindling 
bushes, bare at the bottom, where they ought to 
present a mass of branches and leaves; with 
sprawling tops straggling skywards, and show¬ 
ing plentifully scattered gaps in which dead 
bushes or vacant spaces appear. Others are 
simply rows of small trees ten or twelve feet 
high, with bare stems and intermingled tops. 
These may serve as wind-breaks, but the trees 
are too far apart to serve a useful purpose as 
hedges without help from wire or rails. 
Rarely we have seen a hedge which has been 
pruned, plashed, and trained into such a shape 
as will make it serviceable. The numberless 
■BADLY BROKEN HEDGE ROW. 
new breakings for hedge-rows we have seen, all 
wrongly plowed, render it easy to recognize the 
sufficient reasons for these costly failures. For 
a useless hedge, after one has planted and 
waited patiently several years for it to grow, is 
a costly failure; and when the fact begins to 
dawn upon the owner’s mind that lie has made 
an error and his labor has been lost, the disap¬ 
pointment will be bitter indeed. 
The general plan pursued is to plow a ridge 
with a back-furrow in the center as shown at 
figure 1. Here there is an unbroken strip of sod 
(when it is on prairie) or hard soil (on fallow) in 
the center. When this is harrowed a fair enough 
surface appears, but it is a fallacious hope to 
expect young plants to grow or thrive with such 
an impenetrable bed of soil beneath them 
(fig. 2). The first growth is weak, irregular, 
and many vacant spots occur. “ Thus bad be¬ 
gins, but worse remains behind.” Unfortunate 
in its birth, the hedge is neglected in its youth, 
untrained and unchecked in its mature age, and 
it ends by becoming a mere cumberer of the 
ground, costly and troublesome to get rid of, 
and useless and unsightly while it remains. 
Now, we would suggest a different treatment. 
The hedge-row should be plowed with an open 
furrow in the center, as shown in fig. 3. When 
the sod is rotted the row should be harrowed, 
and the furrow should be closed by twice gath¬ 
ering the ridge. Then there is a deep, mellow, 
dry bed for the plants, in which the roots have 
PROPERLY BROKEN HEDGE-ROW.. 
room to go down into the subsoil and spread s 
beneath the surface and gather ample nutri¬ 
ment. As the growth of root so will be the. 
growth of the aerial part of the plant. Fig. 4, 
shows the shape of the ridge as thus prepared.. 
The seed should be sown in a nursery bed in 
rows, and the young plants well cultivated. 
Take up in the fall and “heel in,’’ and the sec¬ 
ond spring set the thriftiest in the hedge-row. 
A double row hedge will be found far preferable 
both as a barrier against stock and as a wind- 
Fig. 1.- 
Fig. 2.—EFFECT OF PLANTING ON FIG. 1. 
F)"-. 3.— 
