1904 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
155 
HOW TO KILL CHICK WEED. 
I have a piece of ground containing about three acres 
on which I have spent weeks of labor and hundreds of 
dollars in taking out stones and ditching, it being a low 
piece but very fertile. I prepared it especially for straw¬ 
berries and have been rewarded by several fine crops of 
berries, it holding the moisture when most soils are too 
dry in a dry season, but the chickweed has taken pos¬ 
session and requires 10 times the labor as before, which 
costs so much that it takes off the profits. Can I plant 
this piece to com, and by hoeing it 20 times if necessary 
overcome this pest, or would it be best to sow rye and 
vetch the latter part of the season to smother it out, or 
what shall I do with the piece to overcome the evil? 
Massachusetts. o. s. 
1 have had to fight this pest for 20 years. On some 
pieces of ground I have succeeded in cleaning it out 
thoroughly until such time as I had to put the land in 
grass, when it again became infested with the weed. 
My method of keeping it down is thorough and con¬ 
stant cultivation, where the crop on the ground per¬ 
mits that plan to be followed, and when it does not, 
hand picking of the weed and carrying it off in bas¬ 
kets. It is useless to pull it out and then let it re¬ 
main on the ground. It will take hold and grow 
again. The plant is a persistent seeder. It will 
sprout, grow, blossom and go to seed in three weeks, 
at any time of year when the ground is not frozen 
and the sun shines a little. The seed seems to retain 
its vitality for several years while lying in the soil, 
and if brought near the surface will sprout, though 
several years old. It will be seen from this that one 
year’s effort cannot rid a piece of ground of the pest. 
It is only on land that is thoroughly worked for sev¬ 
eral successive years that it can be exterminated. I 
will add an experience that I had three 
years ago. I had a piece of garden land 
that was fairly carpeted with chickweed. 
When the weed had attained a rank 
growth and was about in full blossom I 
plowed it under and very little chick- 
weed has come up on that piece of 
ground since. I cannot warrant this 
treatment as a remedy, as I have only 
tried it once, but it certainly worked 
well that time and I shall try it again. 
If 0. S. plants his ground to corn and 
cultivates it so that not one chickweed 
goes to seed, he will have a much clean¬ 
er field the next year, though he will 
probably have a good bit of the weed left 
yet, coming up from old seed. I do not 
believe that sowing rye or vetch will 
help him. I have never been able to find 
anything that would come up quickly 
enough or grow thick enough to keep 
chickweed down. It flourishes on my 
farm in the thickest sod. The hoe, fin¬ 
gers and basket are tne only sure ex¬ 
terminators. THOS. K. HUNT. 
SLATE VS. SHINGLES. 
When your correspondent, R. F., on 
page 85, made his case out in favor of 
slate for roofing purposes, he inadvert¬ 
ently omitted one very serious objection 
that slate has in that connection, namely, that it re¬ 
quires extra timber supports that will greatly add to 
the cost of the roof without adding to its value as a 
roof. This extra cost is considerable, and the sup¬ 
ports must be adequate or the roof will sag. Another 
objection is that slate, poor and good alike, will crack 
with the frost, and when a slate becomes broken it is 
difficult to repair the break, and as a matter of fact 
the break usually goes unmended. A slate roof does 
make a hot roof in Summer, and a very cold one in 
Winter. I have slept under such roofs, Summer and 
Winter, and I know. The house I owned before com¬ 
ing to my present place was covered with slate, and 
I have been a guest in several other houses that were 
covered with slate, and I will take the wooden roof 
every time for comfort. As to the shingle roof catch¬ 
ing fire from the chimney, that occurs very infre¬ 
quently. Taking the number of wooden roofs into 
consideration and the number of fires that come from 
the roofs taking fire, the proportion is very small. 
The roof of my own home last September took fire, 
and the house was entirely destroyed, but that was 
the first time in nearly 100 years that this had hap¬ 
pened, and it happened this time because an unfriend¬ 
ly neighbor built an immense brush fire within 160 
feet of the roof when the wind was blowing at a 30- 
mile rate into the house; it was little wonder that the 
old roof caught from a spark. I at once put on a 
heart cypress shingle roof and in the Spring will coat 
it with Cabot’s creosote shingle stain, which will 
make it sufficiently fireproof. a. a. k. 
Pennsylvania. 
“Slate or Shingles for Roofing” on page 85 inter¬ 
ested me very much. The writer’s prices and state¬ 
ments in regard to shingles paralyze me. He speaks 
of shingles at from $17.50 to $23 per 1,000, with snow 
drifting into the house under them, and having to 
be reroofed after 15 years. Good cedar shingles can be 
purchased here for less than $5 per 1,000, and I have 
a roof that is good yet that was laid 20 years ago 
with $3. s. 
Grand Isle, Vt. _ 
EXPERIENCE WITH BORDEAUX MIXTURE. 
Mr. Mead After the Professors. 
The article, page. 91, on potato spraying, by H. W. 
Heaton, is one of the most valuable articles I have 
read in The R. N.-Y. for a long time. If everyone 
was as anxious for the truth and truth only it would 
be better for many of us. In reading many articles 
on spraying by our agricultural professors, we are 
many times reminded of the patent medicine almanacs 
we used to read, no matter how you lived, take a few 
bottles of their compound and you would always be 
w’ell, and so may writers give the impression no mat¬ 
ter how unfavorable the location or poor the season, 
use plenty of Bordeaux and you will have full crops. 
I remember asking a professor from a New England 
experiment station in 1902 how his apples were. The 
answer was “poor,” and when we saw apples that 
were sprayed by men who knew their business we 
could not fail to lose faith in raising perfect fruit in 
an unfavorable season. Here the Summer months in 
1902 were the coldest for at least 46 years with much 
wet and cloudy weather including September. In 
many of those articles criticising farmers and fruit 
growers for not spraying and raising sound fruit and 
potatoes I have never seen that fact mentioned, and 
are not some agricultural professors and farmers 
alike? Give them a favorable season and conditions 
and they rush into print to tell of their success; of 
their failures never. h. o. mead. 
Massachusetts. 
Has Not Made It Pay. 
Although I do not raise very many potatoes, I have 
tried spraying for two years, and have failed to per¬ 
ceive any advantage. In 1902 I spraye.d about two 
acres four times, using the 5-5-50 formula. It was 
very wet here during July and August so it did not 
stick very well. Result, three-fourths of them rotted. 
I could not see that they were a bit better than those 
that were not sprayed. In 1903 I sprayed three times 
with the same formula. I could not see any difference 
in the sprayed and unsprayed pieces. Potatoes were 
very poor in this section last year, not much more 
than half a crop. This is all the experience I have 
had, and the result has been that it does not pay. I 
have tried to spray as thoroughly as possible so as to 
get the vines well covered, and it means quite a lot 
of trouble and expense. I would like very much to 
hear from some or all potato growers in regard to 
this matter. f. e. w. 
Reed’s Ferry, N. H. 
Would Not Give It Up. 
For the past three years I have used the Bordeaux 
Mixture for Potato blight, and in my opinion results 
depended upon the thoroughness with which the work 
was done. I should not want to give up spraying 
anyway. I use an ordinary barrel sprayer, which I 
mounted on wheels, and use seven Vermorel spray¬ 
ers connected to the barrel by one-half-inch gas pipe 
and a short piece of hose. One man does the pump¬ 
ing and driving and does 20 acres a day. Clogging 
nozzles formerly gave a good deal of trouble, but by 
using a prepared or flour lime this trouble was over¬ 
come. When bugs were troublesome Paris-green was 
used in the Bordeaux Mixture. One thing that both¬ 
ered me was the large amount required, often three- 
fourths of a pound to a barrel of water. Last year in 
the press of work spraying was neglected some, and 
the blight finally got in its work, but not until the 
crop was nearly out of danger. I have never kept the 
blight entirely away, but it always stayed away from 
my fields longer than from the fields of my neighbors 
who did not spray. I believe it has paid me well to 
spray. c. n. 
Stanley, N. Y. 
PAINTING APPLE TREES. 
Last year Prof. W. B. Alwood, of the Virginia Experi¬ 
ment Station, gave his experience with painting grow¬ 
ing trees with a mixture of oil and pure white lead as a 
protection from vermin. Practical growers objected to 
the plan—though few of them had tried it. Prof. Alwood 
now gives further facts. The tree shown at Fig. 65 is an 
Albemarle Pippin which was kept constantly painted. 
The great array of opinions which you publish in 
your issues of October 31 and November 7 last, ap¬ 
peared to me to be entirely from people who have 
never used the paint, hence I do not think it is a re¬ 
flection upon them to say that these are the views of 
the men who seem not to be posted on the question. 
I am still receiving requests from your subscribers, 
for further particulars about this work, and asking 
me whether I still hold to the views expressed In The 
R. N.-Y. Recently I have had opportu¬ 
nity to examine several thousand trees 
which have been treated under my di¬ 
rection with white paint, from the time 
they were set, and some of these are 
even painted not only over the entire 
trunk, but several inches on the main 
limbs. One orchard in particular of 15,- 
000 apple trees in a body, is a striking 
sight. The trees are now six and seven 
years old and have been painted without 
exception from the beginning. They are 
certainly as pretty a lot of trees as one 
ever need wish to look at, and the owner 
tells me that he has never had the 
slightest injury from vermin around the 
base of the tree, and while he has the 
trees examined for borers annually, they 
have not found one borer to a dozen 
trees. This is a better result than I 
would expect, because the Round-head¬ 
ed Apple-tree borer is a veritable 
scourge in this country. 
The views of some of the people 
who object to painting the trees 
imply a mistaken idea in regard to 
the physiological processes which 
take place in the bark of the tree 
trunk. Some of them seem to think 
that it is important that the tree 
trunk should be uncovered so that 
respiration may take place through 
the bark, while as a matter of fact, the bark on an 
apple tree is especially designed by nature to prevent 
respiration and evaporation. It is true that as long 
as the bark remains green, it in a measure performs 
the same functions as the leaves, but this function 
ceases as soon as the corky deposit forms in the bark 
tissues, and the trunk of the tree thereafter ceases to 
perform the functions of respiration, or to permit to 
any marked degree the loss of water by evaporation 
through its tissues. I have thoroughly proven by 
trials covering many thousands of trees, that white 
paint made from pure lead and pure linseed oil does 
not penetrate beyond the outer cuticle of the bark, 
and that it has not the slightest effect in the way of 
binding or cramping the growth of the trunk of apple 
trees. I sincerely hope that some of these doubting 
people will try this method in a commercial way and 
learn its real value. It is being very largely prac¬ 
ticed in some of the Southern States, as I have been 
advising it for the past 12 or 15 years. If one has but 
a few trees to paint it would certainly be something 
of a bother, but where one undertakes this job with 
the proper equipment and men who are competent to 
perform the same, it is not costly, especially when 
considering the immunity secured from all sorts of 
vermin around the base of the trees, and the almost 
entire prevention of loss from borers. If anyone 
wishes to note the appearance of our trees on the 
Station grounds, after 15 years of such applications 
as I recommend, they have only to consult Bulletin 
130, issued by me the past Summer. A picture of such 
a tree is shown at Fig. 65. It appears to me that I 
ought not to close without uttering a protest against 
Prof. Waugh’s recommendation of barnyard manure 
to be banked up around apple trees. I have found 
this a most dangerous practice to orchards, and have 
repeatedly seen trees killed by banking manure 
around the trunk, and can say that ordinarily it en¬ 
courages the presence of mice rather than preventing 
the same. It would have no effect in preventing the 
injury from rabbits or borers. w. b. alwood. 
Virginia Experiment Station. 
