DESTRUCTION OF WEEDS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XXIX, Issue 7349, 2 December 1907, Page 4

DESTRUCTION OF WEEDS.

AN IMPORTANT DISCOVERY.

The Los Angeles Examiner (California) of October 14 has the following article ;

This is to announce a discovery for the destruction of weeds on a vast scale.

For the city dweller weeds are important, even though he may never see them,

For the man in the city buys the farmer's produce. He pays for the farmer's work, and he pays for the weeds m the long run. Only the farmer knows what a curse weeds are, What an endless war must be waged against them. They do in the fields what the dangerous microbes do in the human system. Where the farmer fertilises, cultivates and sows, the weed seeds are brought by the wind. As the wheat grows, its enemies grow with it —wild mustard and all the countless other enemies of well-kept fields. Farmers and dwellers .in cities pay among them hundreds of millions in every year in" work and loss of crops— all because of weeds.

A wise German—one of the many men now devoting intelligence to problems of earth cultivation—announces that- weeds in growing grain may be destroyed by spraying, with iron sulphate. „, In Wisconsin experiments have been made most successfully, following upon the experiments which originated in Germany.

The iron sulphate destroys wild mustard, which alone does many millions of damage annually ; it destroys also other weeds—yellow dock, cockle-burr, smart weed (the kind that Abraham Lincoln rubbed into the eyes of the bully who insisted on swearing in a woman's presence), rag weeds, etc. The beauty of it is that this iron sulphat destroys the weed without injuring the grain. Why that is so is not yet known. But if further experiments justify present expectations, it may safely be said that the German who gave that weed-fighting idea to the world will have given to mankind annually wealth that must be estimated in hundreds of millions for this continent alone. Every weed in a grain fiold, as you should know, takes up for itself so much room, just so much of the~precious moisture and just so much of the soil's strength.

The destruction of these weeds in our fields is a great problem, as is the destruction of tuberculosis germs in our lungs, of bad habits in our temperaments, etc.

Men progress slowly along all lines. We know more, we live more temperately, we make the earth more fruitful, we put iron machines to work where human beings were slaves.

The growth of humanity, like that of an individual body, is so slow that we do not notice it. But it goes on all the time. Each day some little thing is gained—little compared with the whole, but wonderful in results. This, earth and this civilisation of ours will be worth looking at when we get finished with them. And the brain of man must do the work, and it can do the work. That is the inspiring thought.

In connection with the foregoing article, Mr E. Fondi Wright, formerly of Ashburton, wrote the following letter :

W. R. Hearst, editor Examiner. Dear Sir, —Your recent editorial on the destruction of weeds says : "A ' wiaj German states that sulphate of iron destroys weeds growing among cereal crops without injuring the grain,, butwhy that is so is not yet known."

In "Plant Disease," written, by myself and published in 1903, one page 146 I say : '

"For several years I have maintained that many weeds owe their existence to an impoverished soil. The action of a solution of sulphate of iron would be toward producing chlorophyll, and, as the dodders contain no chlorophyll ,the chemical change produced would be inimical to their growth."

Wild mustard contains a much lower percentage of chlorophyll than the cereals, clovers, etc., and so could not take as much iron into its lpaves as plants named without injury to itself. On page 159 I say : "What I wish to put forward as my contention is that, side by side, with the normal vegetation having a proper chlorophyll, exists a class of vegetable and insect life- which depends upon chlorotic. conditions for its very existence." . '

In plain English, a soil that would produce normal cereals, clovers, etc., would not grow weeds like dodder, wild mustard, and many others. The soils in. which these weeds do grow are at least wanting in assimilable iron, and when you spray the wheat plant growing in this soil with a solution of iron you tend to produce a normal chlorophyll and an abnormal one in wild mustard and other weeds. E. FONDI WRIGHT. Los Angeles, Oct. 15,'