HOUSE AND GARDEN 
180 
If you have a wheel hoe with the drill seeder attachment the whole pro¬ 
cess of planting can be done with little more effect than walking up 
and down the rows. The cost is $n 
water ranks beside it. You may not see at first what the matter 
of frequent cultivation has to do with water. But let us stop a 
moment and look into it. fake a strip of blotting paper, dip one 
end in water, and watch the moisture run up hill, soak up through 
the blotter. The scientists have labeled that “capillary attrac¬ 
tion”- — the water crawls up little invisible tubes formed by the 
texture of the blotter. Now take a similar piece, cut it across, 
hold the two cut edges firmly together, and try it again. The 
wetness refuses to cross the line: the connection has been severed. 
In the same way the water stored in the soil after a rain begins 
at once to escape again into the atmosphere. That on the surface 
evaporates first, and that which has soaked in begins to soak up 
through the soil to the surface. 11 is leaving your garden, through 
the millions of soil tubes, just as surely as if you had a two-inch 
pipe and a gasoline engine, pumping it into the gutter night and 
day! Save your garden by stopping the waste. It is the easiest 
thing in the world to do — cut the pipe in two. And the knife to 
do it with is— dust. By frequent cultivation of the surface soil— 
not more than one or two inches deep for most small vegetables— 
the soil tubes are kept broken, and a mulch of dust is maintained. 
Try to get over every part of your garden, especially where it is 
not shaded, once in every ten days or two weeks. Does that seem 
like too much work? You can push your wheel hoe through, and 
thus keep the dust mulch as a constant protection, as fast as you 
can walk. If you wait for the weeds, you will nearly have to 
crawl through, doing more or less harm by disturbing your growing 
plants, losing all the plant-food (and they'll take the cream) which 
they have consumed, and actually putting in more hours of infin¬ 
itely more disagreeable work. “A stitch in time saves nine!” 
Have your thread and needle ready beforehand! If 1 knew how 
to give greater emphasis to this subject of thorough cultivation, 
I should be tempted to devote the rest of this article to it. If the 
beginner at gardening has not been convinced by the facts given, 
there is only one thing left to convince him—experience. 
Having given so much space to the reason for constant care in 
this matter, the question of methods naturally follows. I want 
to repeat here, my advice of last month’s article—by all means get 
a wheel hoe. The simplest sorts cost only a few dollars, and will 
not only save you an infinite amount of time and work, but do the 
work better, very much better than it can be done by hand. You 
can grow good vegetables, especially if your garden is a very small 
one, without one of these labor-savers, but I can assure you that 
'May, 1910 
you will never regret the small investment necessary to procure 
it. 
The wheel hoe, however, will not do away entirely with the 
work of hand hoes and hand weeders, and to the uninitiated brief 
descriptions of the various forms of these, and their uses, will be of 
some assistance. 
The iron garden rake I mention first, because it can be used 
within a few days after the garden is made, and several days before 
the little seedlings are above ground, to rake, very lightly, cross- 
ways over the rows, thus destroying the first crop of weeds, and 
also to prevent the soil from crusting over, as it will tend to do 
after a rain. 
The ordinary hand hoe is familiar to everyone. It is usually 
constructed with a blade six to nine inches wide and half that in 
depth, and is still employed more universally than any other single 
agricultural implement, because of the wide variety of use to which 
it can be put. 11 is used to open up drills or dig out hills for seeds, 
to cover the seed and firm the earth over it; and when the little 
plants push through, to break and loosen the soil about them, and 
to cut off and dig out weeds. Then, later, to keep the rows be¬ 
tween the plants loosened up and clean, and to draw moist fresh 
earth about such plants as require it. In the infancy of agriculture 
—and half a century ago it had hardly been weaned—the hoe had 
to be made pretty heavy to stand all the rough work required of it. 
But now there is a modified form, often listed in the catalogues 
as an “onion hoe”, which is much smaller and lighter, much easier 
and more rapid to use, and which, for opening up drills for small 
seed, and cutting out small weeds about plants in the rows — after 
the wheel hoe has taken care of the spaces between, is in every 
way preferable. In my own work, even in field culture of such 
rank growing crops as potatoes and corn, except for heavy soils, it 
Try to get over every part of your garden, especially where it is not 
shaded, once in every ten days to break up the surface crust 
