28 
HOUSE AND GARDEN 
July, 1913 
A great advantage of this method of irrigation is that it may be employed without the inconveniences 
caused by dragging hose about in the ordinary way 
of animals. I11 the first place all its food must be absorbed in the 
form of soups—weaker soups than you have ever encountered. 
These solutions are absorbed by the feeding rootlets of the plant, 
and carried up through the stalk to all points of leaf, fruit and 
flower, whence the larger part of the water passes off again into 
the air. In the second place the manure, rotting sod and other 
sources of plant food in the soil, have to go through a process 
of decomposition before the plant foods which they contain be¬ 
come available 
to the feeding 
roots, and abun¬ 
dant moisture is 
one of the main 
factors in effect¬ 
ing this decom¬ 
position. 
It thus be- 
comes evident 
that the water 
has three dis¬ 
tinct jobs to do 
in the soil. It 
is really grocer, 
cook, and wait¬ 
er com b i n e d ; 
that is, it gets 
the food into 
such form and 
position that the 
plant can utilize it, it prepares the plant meal, and then dis¬ 
tributes it to the hungry growing cells in every part of the plant’s 
anatomy. No wonder that, when this indispensable servant is 
off duty, plants starve in the midst of plenty. 
A poor garden is usually the result of starvation. I do not 
mean a poorly kept garden, but a garden poor in results—a 
garden that is yielding 40 or 60% crops where it should be 
yielding 80 or 90% (and in¬ 
cidentally a difference of 20% 
in the yield very often means a 
difference of 100% in the prof¬ 
its). I have encountered most 
of the enemies which lie in wait 
on every hand for the gardener, 
also the problems of good seed, 
the best varieties, how to feed 
the soil, etc., and after seeing 
at first hand, and at second hand 
in other people’s gardens, the 
results of the damage done as 
a consequence of our imperfect 
control of all of these things, 
I am convinced that an insuffi¬ 
cient supply of moisture in the 
soil causes a bigger loss in gar¬ 
den crops than any other factor 
the gardener has to contend with. 
If this is true it means that 
our garden methods have been out of proportion; that we have 
been giving study and money to see that we got plenty of plant 
food into the soil, but have not taken sufficient care that it got 
out of the soil into the plants. Of late years much has been 
said and written about “constant cultivation,” “surface culti¬ 
vation,” “maintaining the soil mulch,” etc. All of these things, 
as results have shown, have been a step in the right direction; 
that is, they aimed to conserve what moisture there was already 
in the soil, and to make it go as far as possible. They could not, 
however, add a single quart of water to the moisture in the soil, 
and when, as has frequently been the case, the natural rainfall 
was insufficient, the crops have had to suffer in spite of the 
best of care. In other words, surface cultivation can save a 
crop; it cannot produce one. Of course, it was very satisfying 
to get a half-sized head of lettuce, or a half measure full of beans, 
instead of none at all, but the next step should be to make sure 
of the full-sized head and the full measure, every trip; and 
irrigation, and irrigation only, can guarantee this result. 
Of course all 
these things were 
as true two hun¬ 
dred years ago as 
they are today. 
Why, then, if 
water is such a 
very important 
factor, has it not 
received adequate 
attention before 
this? In the first 
place, the other 
factors in the 
problem were not 
so well under¬ 
stood ; and in the 
second, while the 
beneficial results 
of irrigation, in 
The patent unions enable the nozzle-lines to be revolved without 
causing leakage 
individual cases, 
have always been recognized, it has been only within the last 
few years that a thoroughly efficient system, suitable for opera¬ 
tion under almost all conditions, has been available. 
Few people realize how serious the loss caused by lack of 
moisture is. If an onion, an egg-plant, or a potato, which 
with plenty of water would normally have reached four inches 
in diameter, stops at two inches, on account of a semi-drought 
season, the result is a crop not 
one-half as large, but only one- 
eighth ! Furthermore, dry soil 
means not only small crops but 
slow growing crops, and it not 
infrequently so delays things 
that only one crop can be taken 
off where otherwise two might 
have been grown. Two instances 
of this kind occurred in my own 
garden last year. A patch of 
early cabbage which we had ex¬ 
pected to follow with celery was 
so delayed in maturing that this 
plan had to be given up, as it 
was in a part of the ground 
which could not be reached by 
our irrigating system. In an¬ 
other place, we dug early pota¬ 
toes from soil that was dust dry. 
Here we set out a succession 
crop of late cabbages, but had it not been possible for us to 
extend the nozzle-lines of our irrigation system, and furnish them 
with several copious “rains,” I doubt if a single plant would 
have lived. In fact we would not have risked setting them 
out. As it was, we not only saved them, but gave them such a 
good start that they were able to mature a big crop before freez¬ 
ing weather. That one crop more than payed for the price of 
nozzles and pipe which we used in saving it. 
If through the agency of some modern Aladdin’s lamp, you 
(Continued on page 48) 
