The long growing season of the south makes it almost impossible, at least impracticable, to keep the garden clear f weeds all summer. No matter how clean the garden may be kept throughout the earlier part of the season, the weeds creep in Iater on, and in the fall the garden looks more like a weed bed than anything else.
” Last year,” writes A. Jeffers of Fairfax county, Virginia, “we adopted a new plan. We planted watermelons, cantaloups, cucumbers, beans, sweet corn, sunflowers, and several other minor garden crops, all in ope patch, and in long rows, to be mainly cultivated with the horse. At the last working, which covered an area f little more than one acre, we sowed cowpeas between all the rows, and worked them into the, soil nicely.
“By the time the melons were ripe not a melon nor a melon vine was to be seen, and yet the patch was covered with them, hidden away under the foliage of the peas. We had no trouble in picking the melons and other vegetables, and by being a little careful in gathering the garden sass for the table, did not at all injure the protecting crop of pea vines.
“‘In October we finished ‘mowing and taking up the peas and had 40 cocks, ‘nearly a ton of fine forage for the cow. The garden patch was not only free from weeds, but the land is actually better.
” Had we not sown this crop the garden would have been the worst looking patch of land on the farm. On a small part of this garden we sowed, as an experiment, crimson clover with the peas, but the growth of peas was so luxuriant that the clover smothered out.”
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