Cultivating Vegetables in your Garden

As far as weeds are concerned any gardener of experience will not need to be told of the importance of keeping his crops clean.

Having learned from bitter experience the price of letting weeds get a start we know that one or two days of growth followed perhaps by a day or so of rain, may easily double or treble the work of cleaning a patch of onions or carrots and that where weeds have attained any size they cannot be taken out of sowed crops without doing a great deal of injury.

We also know that every day's growth means just so much available plant food stolen from under the very roots of his crops. Instead of letting the weeds steal any food meant for the plant we should remove them, because clean and frequent cultivation not only breaks the soil up mechanically but lets in air, moisture and heat all of which are essential in effecting the chemical balance necessary to convert non- available into available plant food.

We all know the necessity of keeping the soil loosened about our growing crops. Plants need to breathe. Their roots need air. You might as well expect to find the rosy glow of happiness on the wan cheeks of a cotton-mill child slave as to expect to see the luxuriant dark green of healthy plant life in a suffocated garden.

Obviously air and water are vital. 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. Take 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 action" 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 again into the atmosphere. That on the surface evaporates first, and that which has soaked in begins to soak 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 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. 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's not shaded, once in every ten days or two weeks.

You can push your wheel hoe through, and 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 harm by disturbing your growing plants, losing all the plant food which they have consumed, and actually putting in more hours of work. There are many good books which show good tools detailed at this resource:


What's the best methods. Get a wheel hoe. The simplest sorts will not only save you an infinite amount of time and work but they do the work better. You can grow good vegetables, especially if your garden is a very small one, without one of these labour-savers, and you won't regret the small investment in buying it. With a wheel hoe, the work of preserving the soil mulch becomes very simple.

Keeping weeds cleaned out of the rows and between the plants in the rows is so much easier if you tackle the job frequently. Do it while the ground is soft. 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. The skilful use of the wheel hoe can be acquired through practice only.

The first thing to learn is to only watch the wheels, the blades, disc or rakes will take care of themselves. The operation of "hilling" consists in drawing up the soil about the stems of growing plants, usually at the time of second or third hoeing.

It used to be the practice to hill everything that could be hilled "up to the eyebrows," but it has gradually been discarded for what is termed "level culture"; and you will readily see the reason, from what has been said about the escape of moisture from the surface of the soil; for of course the two upper sides of the hill, which may be represented by an equilateral triangle with one side horizontal, give more exposed surface than the level surface represented by the base. In wet soils or seasons hilling may be advisable, but very seldom otherwise. 

Crop rotation: 

There is another thing to be considered in making each vegetable do its best and that's crop rotation, or the following of any vegetable with a different sort at the next planting. With some vegetables, such as cabbage, this is almost imperative, and practically all are helped by it. Even onions, which are popularly supposed to be the the exception to the rule, are healthier and do as well after a different crop provided the soil is as finely pulverized and rich as a previous crop of onions would leave it.

Editor
Peter Charalambos

Author: Peter Charalambos

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