WEEDS. AND THE MANAGEMEN"f OF THEM Weeds are plants that are not wanted. They are of two general kinds, — those that inhabit waste or unoccupied areas, and those that invade cropped lands and compete with the plants that the husbandman grows. Certain species of plants are by nature adapted to occupy such places or to engage in such competition, and these particu lar plants are commonly known as weeds ; but weediness is not charac terized by species but by habits and adapta bilities. Any plant may be a weed at times. Buckwheat or rye is a weed when it volun teers in other crops and becomes a nuisance. Elm-tree seedlings may be pestiferous. When any crop is too thick, there is competition among fellows, and the weaker and useless ones are weeds to the better ones. It has been said that the worst weed in a corn-field is corn.
All plants are contending for a place in which to live and to spread their kind. They all are invading new fields. The more suc cessful their invasion, the more inimical they are to other plants. They overrun, and we call them weeds. The weed plants are there fore virile and persistent types. They are weeds because of one or all of these attri butes: (1) They are adapted to a wide range of conditions ; (2) many of them have a life-cycle similar to that of some cultivated plant ; (3) they are tenacious of life ; (4) they produce seeds or other propaga ting parts in abundance ; (5) they have means of disseminating the seeds or parts, either by natural agencies or by resembling crop seeds so closely in size pr weight that they cannot be read ily separated.
All this sounds very simple, but it is a fact that we really do not know just why some of the weeds follow cer tain crops or how they injure the crops. More than once the editorials in these volumes have suggested that there may be relationships between plants that have been past finding out. On the face of it, it seems plain enough that weeds reduce the yields in crops by competing for water and food. We think we know that this is often the case.
These discussions at once suggest the one means of dealing with weeds,— the working out of such a system of crop management that they find the least opportunity to gain a foothold. It is commonly advised that the farmer do
this and do that to destroy weeds —always putting the em phasis on the word destroy ; but while it may be useful to prevent wild carrot from seeding, it is much more to the point not to have wild carrot. Much of the current advice on the destruction of weeds is of small value, for the farmer has little time or opportunity to hunt out the different species and then labbriously to prevent them from seeding or to spud them out at a certain season of the year, or to practice other very special methods. The fundamental thing is to apprehend the fact that certain weeds follow certain crops and certain methods of farming.
Crop management, there fore, necessarily involves weed management. A weed infested farm is not merely a shiftless farm in the sense of being untidy, but it is a poorly farmed farm. Some of the fundamental means of preventing weeds are: good ) rotation courses; clean till age ; cleaning up of waste places in which weeds breed; care in the choice of clean seed ; care to see that the manure does not carry seeds; alertness to recognize new weeds when they begin to invade the neighborhood. This means that the farmer should endeavor to deter mine why he is possessed of certain weeds: this discovered, he can then proceed to treat the question rationally.
There are, of course, special methods for certain weeds and cer tain conditions. Summer fallowing is a means of cleaning fields of weeds, but it is usually necessary for this purpose only in new lands or those that have been improperly handled.
Pasturing with sheep is an other special method. Spray ing with poisons will despatch some kinds of weeds. Mowing at certain times of the year will dispense with others. Burning the fields is often useful. In meadows and lawns, it is often possible to eliminate weeds by fertilizing and re-seeding the invaded parts, for usually the weeds do not run out the grass, but the weeds invade because the sod is poor.