Time-tested advice
on how to plan, prepare, grow and harvest a bountiful family
vegetable garden.
All small, delicate crops which require hand weeding should be
cleaned out at once as soon as they can be seen in the row. A
delay of forty-eight hours will often double the work, and a week
may entirely ruin the crop. The best time to destroy a weed is
before it comes up, and the mere stirring of the surface for an
inch as soon as the land is dry enough to work after a rain will
kill nine-tenths of the weeds that have started. Make it a rule
that a weed shall never go to seed on your garden. The average
farmer's garden of one-fourth of an acre ripens enough weed seed
to supply the entire farm, and it will take more than five years
to get such a garden clean, but if clean cultivation is persevered
the time will come when the labor of cultivating the garden will
be reduced one-half. It is not difficult to keep a garden clear of
weeds if all the crops are planted in rows running the length of
the garden.
