HOUSE AND GARDEN 
UNE, 1913 
459 
little difference does it make what material is employed that the 
upper surface of the soil, if soaked, itself can be utilized for this 
purpose, thus making a soil or dust mulch about which you have 
heard much said during the last few years. The effect of this 
soil mulch on the surface is to keep the ground below it shaded, 
cool and moist. To accomplish this result the upper surface for 
a couple of inches or so in depth has to be kept hot, dry and 
dusty; this to be maintained in such condition must be disturbed 
or “cultivated'’ frequently, because as soon as a crust forms, as it 
will do within a few hours after a rain, especially in hot, bright 
weather, its benefits are lost and the moisture begins to escape 
at once by what is known as “capillary attraction’’ from the lower 
levels of the soil up through the surface and into the atmosphere. 
This “leakage” goes on over every square inch of your garden, 
no matter how large it may be, and the resulting loss is very 
serious; the only way of preventing it is frequent cultivation. 
Another great benefit of thorough cultivation, which is not 
usually credited to it, is the fact that the finer the particles into 
which the soil is broken up, the more rapidly will the various 
forms of plant food locked up within it become dissolved and 
changed into forms which are 
“available” for feeding the 
rootlets of the plant; for, as 
we have already seen in the 
discussion of plant food 
(manures and fertilizers), it 
is not merely the kinds and 
the amount of plant food con¬ 
tained in the soil but the 
forms in which they exist, 
which determine the kind of 
a living the plant will get 
there, just, for instance, as 
you might fare very poorly 
if locked up in a meat mar¬ 
ket with a lot of raw meat, 
raw vegetables and canned 
goods. 
Then, too, as we have also 
already seen, the various 
plant foods have to be in the 
form of solutions before the 
tiny roots can absorb them; 
therefore the more the soil is 
kept broken up the more read¬ 
ily can the moisture penetrate 
to every part of it and put 
into a condition for the plant’s 
use any foodstuffs which may 
be in the soil. 
Nowadays, when a half 
hour snatched before train 
time in the morning or toward 
evening after the day’s work, 
is frequently all the time 
there is available for tending 
the home garden, it is abso¬ 
lutely necessary to use all 
one’s energy and time in the 
most efficient way possible. The only way to do this is to have 
an adequate supply of modern garden tools and to keep them in 
excellent working order; of these the wheel-hoe with a seed drill 
attachment is the most important. I have already mentioned the 
desirability of having one of these machines for doing the sow¬ 
ing and planting of all sorts of seed. With them the work of 
cultivation is done so much more quickly, easily and neatly that 
anyone attempting to get along without one might reasonably 
refuse to make use of modern rapid transit in getting to his work 
in the morning. The wheel-hoe is a very simple machine, indeed, 
and yet it will do good work only when properly taken care of, 
which means that it should always be kept under cover when not 
in use and always be thoroughly cleaned after using; for if it is 
put away in a dirty or wet condition it will soon become so rusted 
as to become seriously impaired in its efficiency. But keeping 
the wheel-hoe clean and in good working order is by no means 
all that is required. You will find that quite a good deal of ex¬ 
perimenting is necessary before you can adjust it to do the vari¬ 
ous jobs required of it in the best possible way; also there are 
several extra attachments which every gardener should get, the 
most important of which I consider the “disc attachment,” which 
consists of two gangs of three small discs each, which may be 
adjusted as to distance apart and angle, and the “cultivating 
attachment,” which consists of two gangs of three teeth each 
so arranged that the teeth next to the rows do not cut into the 
ground so deeply as those in the middle. The disc attachment 
should be used for the first two cultivations, as they throw ab¬ 
solutely no earth toward the rows; in fact, it can be so adjusted 
as to shave close up on either 
side of it and leave the center 
absolutely undisturbed, s o 
that it may be used before 
the seeds have got above 
ground at all. We go over 
all our onions, beets, turnips, 
radishes, etc., in this way a 
few days before the seedlings 
will get above ground and 
again before they are big 
enough for the first hand 
weeding, thus reducing this 
time-killing work to the very 
minimum. Even in a very 
small garden the amount of 
time saved in a single season 
will easily repay the small ex¬ 
tra expense of this attach¬ 
ment. For the third cultiva¬ 
tion, which should follow im¬ 
mediately after the hand 
weeding, use the regular cul¬ 
tivator teeth, or better still, 
the special attachment re¬ 
ferred to above, as with this 
you can work the soil more 
deeply without any injury to 
the little seedling plants in 
the rows. For later cultiva¬ 
tions use the flat hoes, which 
should always be kept sharp 
and bright, first with the 
"heel” kept toward the row 
to prevent any earth being 
thrown over the small plants, 
and later reversed with the 
point toward the row, as 
they are less apt to be caught 
in any straying foliage that may be in the way. 
For crops that remain in the ground for a long time, such 
as onions, parsnip, oyster plant, carrots for winter, and so forth, 
which will require a number of cultivations during the summer, 
it is well to use the cultivator teeth every third or fourth time, 
as the soil between the rows becomes packed down quite hard 
from being gone over so frequently. 
(Continued on page 509) 
