Practice in any art is a wonderful enlightener of the understanding. It thus became quite clear to us that the Tetchy family were living handsomely on the strawberries raised on one acre of land, and cream manufactured principally at the kitchen pump. As usual on such occasions, Fred undertook to prove by his figures how much it was they were earning. I think he made it out about a thousand dollars a year; but as his previous calculations touching our own crop had proved rather deceptive, I did not trust implicitly to his conclusions. But he insisted that it must be so, as figures never lied. I suggested, that, though the figures themselves might not lie, yet that instances had been known of their leading to great lies by others,—not meaning, however, to refer to him.
These were among the new changes of the old topic that now formed the staple of our family discussions. As we had done pretty well with a half-acre, we must have more ground planted. It may appear singular that so small a profit, realized only after a whole year of waiting, should prove so powerful a stimulus to further effort. But I well knew that wealth is not suddenly acquired by agriculture of any kind. The great element of value which distinguishes this over other occupations is that of safety,—slow, but sure. If our profit should appear small to others, it was a great affair to us, and we felt reasonably certain that we could make it four times as large. It was therefore determined to have the remaining half-acre broken up and set out with strawberries that fall.
But no one must suppose that our summer occupation was ended when our crop had been marketed and the profit ascertained. All this was accomplished as July was coming in. Immediately after the vines had borne their fruit, they developed new energies in the putting out of a multitude of runners. But meantime the ground had been taken possession of by a fresh crop of weeds, all of which must be removed, and the surface forked up into mellowness, before the runners would take hold and establish themselves into strong, vigorous plants. We therefore entered on a new campaign against these troublesome interlopers, though our hoes were so heavy and clumsy that their unwieldiness fatigued us more than the work itself.
"There goes ten thousand at a pull!" said I to Fred, one day, as he caught hold of a huge thistle with his rake and dragged it out by the roots.
Fred was astounded at this piece of information. He had seen weeds in abundance, but had never gone over the pages of the "Country Gentleman" and the "New England Farmer" as carefully as I had, and hence the thought had never occurred to him that in pulling up a single thistle he was really saving some one else the trouble of getting rid of thousands more.
The subject of this astonishing increase from a single plant thus became a topic for subsequent conversation and research. It being in Fred's line, he looked up several articles about weeds, undertook to extend the calculation, and arrived at results that almost frightened me. A single thistle would produce twenty-four thousand the first year, and five hundred and seventy-six millions the second! and we found that botanists had discovered in all other weeds an approximation to the same amazing power of reproduction. It must not be supposed, however, that every seed will vegetate. Animals and birds consume myriads of them, and other myriads perish under the extreme heat of summer and the equally destructive cold of winter. To some extent Nature thus confines the multiplication of weeds within limits. Botanists assert that these limits are prescribed, and that they cannot be passed. If it were not so, the seed of a single thistle would reproduce itself so rapidly as in a few years to cover with its progeny the entire surface of our planet.
Our ground was singularly troubled with the rag-weed, which we found was immensely prolific. There were numerous other kinds also that came up all over the field, and it appeared to me that those which produced the most seeds threw up the rankest growth. What was greatly to their discredit, none of them produced a flower. So far as I could discover, they performed no other office than that of perfecting a crop of seeds for the sole purpose of next year producing another that would be many thousand times larger. Their stalks and foliage were rejected by cattle, and never came to much as fertilizers. It is probable they have some medicinal virtues, however, as the herb-doctors use them pretty freely. But I could regard them in no other light than nuisances in a strawberry-bed.
So universally are weeds regarded as injurious to agriculture, that laws have been enacted to insure their destruction. In this country it has been made a finable offence to permit the Canada thistle to perfect its seeds. France imposes a heavy penalty on all who are in like manner neglectful of the common thistle. Every man in Denmark who fails to destroy the corn-marigold is severely punished. In the early history of Scotland, whoever "poisoned the king's lands with weeds, introducing thereby a host of enemies," was denounced as a traitor. Unhappily, with us there has been an abundant yield of both. As such instances show how these pests have been regarded by the agricultural world, one would think that it was now time for us to hear of their diminishing in number. But no such diminution can be asserted.
The history of the migration of seeds is full of the most curious statistics. The reviewer of a recent publication makes the following interesting statement.
"The lonely island of St. Helena, for example, at the time of its discovery in 1501, produced about sixty vegetable species. Its flora now comprises seven hundred and fifty species. The faculty of spontaneous reproduction supposes a greater power of accommodation than we find in most domesticated plants. Although every wild species affects a habitat of a particular character, it will grow under conditions extremely unlike those of its birthplace. The seven hundred new species which have found their way to St. Helena within three centuries and a half were probably not in very large proportion designedly introduced there by human art. As a general rule, it may be assumed that man has intentionally transferred fewer plants than he has accidentally into countries foreign to them. Tares follow the wheat. The weeds that grow among the cereal grains, and form the pest of the kitchen-garden, are the same in America as in Europe. Some years ago, the author made a collection of weeds in the wheat-fields of Upper Egypt, and another in the gardens on the Bosphorus. Nearly all the plants were identical with those that grow under the same conditions in New England. The change from one locality to another is effected by a thousand casual circumstances. The upsetting of the wagon of an emigrant in his journey across the Western plains may scatter upon the ground the seeds he designed for his garden. The herbs which fill so important a place in the rustic materia medica of the Eastern States spring up along the prairie-paths just opened by the caravan of the settler. The hortus siccus of a botanist may accidentally sow seeds from the foot of the Himalayas on the plains that skirt the Alps. It is a fact frequently observed, that exotics transplanted to foreign climates suited to their growth escape from the flower-garden, and naturalize themselves among the spontaneous vegetation of the pastures. The straw and grass employed in packing the sculptures of Thorwaldsen were scattered in the court-yard of the museum in Copenhagen, where they are deposited, and the next season there sprang from the seeds no less than twenty-five species of plants belonging to the Roman Campagna. In the campaign of 1814, the Russian troops brought in the stuffing of their saddles seeds from the banks of the Dnieper to the valley of the Rhine, and even introduced the plants of the Steppes into the environs of Paris. The Turkish armies in their incursions into Europe brought Eastern vegetables in their train, and left the seeds of Oriental wall-plants to grow upon the ramparts of Buda and Vienna. The Canada thistle is said to have sprung up in Europe two hundred years ago from a seed which dropped out of the stuffed skin of a bird."