CULTIVATION OF VEGETABLES

Cultivation

The purposes of cultivation are three to get rid of weeds, and to stimulate growth by (1) letting air into the soil and freeing unavailable plant food, and (2) by conserving moisture.

As to weeds, you need not be told the importance of keeping your crops clean.  You have learned from bitter and costly experience the price of letting them get anything resembling a start.  One or two days' growth, after they are well up, followed perhaps by a day or so of rain, may easily double or treble the work of cleaning them out.  And where weeds have attained any size they cannot be taken out without doing a great deal of injury to your crop.  Also realize that every day's growth means just so much available plant food stolen from under the very roots of your crops.

Instead of letting the weeds get away with any plant food, you should be furnishing more, for clean and frequent cultivation will not only break the soil up mechanically, but let in air, moisture and heat all essential in effecting those chemical changes necessary to convert non- available into available plant food.  Soil cultivators had learned by observation the necessity of keeping the soil nicely loosened about their growing crops.  Plants need to breathe.  Their roots need air.

Important as the question of air is, that of water ranks beside it.  You may not see at first what the of frequent cultivation has to do with water.  Take a strip of blotting paper, dip one end in water, and watch the moisture run up hill, soak up through the blotter.  The "capillary attraction" 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 moisture 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 into the atmosphere.  Water on the surface evaporates first, and the water which has soaked in begins to move in through the soil to the surface.  It is leaving your garden, through the millions of soil tubes, just as surely as if you had a two-inch pipe, 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.  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 which they have consumed, and actually putting in more hours of infinitely more disagreeable work.

The matter of keeping weeds cleaned out of the rows and between the plants in the rows is not so quickly accomplished.  Where hand-work is necessary, let it be done at once.  Here are a few practical suggestions that will reduce this work to a minimum;
    (1) Get at this work while the ground is soft; as soon as the soil begins to dry out after a rain is the best time.  Under such conditions the weeds will pull out by the roots, without breaking off.
   
    (2) Immediately before weeding, go over the rows with a wheel hoe, cutting shallow, but just as close as possible, leaving a narrow, plainly visible strip which must be hand- weeded. 
   
    (3) See to it that not only the weeds are pulled but that  every inch  of soil surface is broken up.  It is fully as important that the weeds just sprouting be destroyed, as that the larger ones be pulled up.  One stroke of the weeder or the fingers will destroy a hundred weed seedlings in less time than one weed can be pulled out after it gets a good start.
   
    (4) Use one of the small hand-weeders until you become skilled with it.