Читать книгу Make Your Garden Feed You - E. Brown T. - Страница 30

Whenever the war-time gardener has a little time to spare he should wield the hoe. Hoeing is a very important cultivation operation and the more often it is conducted the better. Hoeing reduces the surface soil to a fine tilth—that is the whole object. Unless the surface soil is worked frequently, minute channels form from the under-soil to the surface and this allows the moisture in the soil to evaporate. Hoeing closes these minute tubes and so conserves moisture.

Hoeing is light work and it saves having to engage in more strenuous labour. Without hoeing the watering-can or the hose-pipe must be used much more often, and this usually means carrying the water a considerable distance on the allotment, since main water is not usually laid on.

A further advantage of applying the hoe is that it kills off small annual weeds, that is, weeds which seed themselves and so come up year after year. Weeds require food as well as the crops you grow, so eradicating them means a greater store of plant food which can be converted into an edible crop. And as you will gather later, the supplying of plant food, or manuring, is no easy task nowadays.