Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 January 1875 — Way to Hoe Understandingly. [ARTICLE]

Way to Hoe Understandingly.

Let us study the course of that intelligent young farmer to whom farming is an art. He examines critically his tool before purchasing; for the quality of the steel he requires the label of some respectable firms; for the rest he is his own judge. His selection is an implement not over wide, having fine and sharp angles, and so mounted on the handle as to require as little stooping as possible. He selects a handle of hard wood (the momentum gained by which being more than an offset to the extra weight), straight grained and rather longer than the average. The handle having been well oiled to prevent its cracking, our farmer is ready for the field. Now study him at work. With many, hoeing is merely a rising and falling of the implement, or what may be called a chopping stroke, with force sufficient to cut up weeds. Our farmer has not only an up-and-doWn stroke, but a swinging, half circular stroke, that-from its effects may be called a cutting or knife stroke; and, moreover, his chopping strokes are made at an angle varying with the kind and size of the weeds. Here is a capital axiom that he has adopted—that weed hoeing has two ends in view, viz., to kill the weeds then growing and to do this in such a manner as to prevent, so far as can be, the seed in tne ground from germinating. AJI tillage soil,” he says, “ has the seed of weeds scattered through it as deep as it is tilled, say for a foot in depth; some of them retain their vegetating powers many years—some only one year. Now, my object in weed hoeing should« be—while destroying the weeds on the present surface, not to make a new surface from which a new crop may start.” He therefore disturbs the surface only enough to kill the weeds; his work presents none of the roughness of the bungler, who wastes vast amounts of strength in rough chopping that takes up weeds by the roots in front of him, but to leave them replanted in the rear of him, while he so disturbs the nnder soil that the seeds therein are brought

sufficiently near the. surface to germinate. If some one should ask, Is not one great object to loosen the soil? he replies: “Certainly, at times; but we are now discussing hoeing as a mere weeding .process.”— Agricola, in New York Heraid.