“A lad I once knew counted the number of seeds in a milkweed pod which he had, and found very nearly two hundred.  I do not remember the exact number.  It was between one hundred and ninety-five and two hundred.  Think of one pod scattering that number of seeds!  Think again of the number of pods on one milkweed plant!  It is staggering, is it not?  To be sure we can remember the parable of the sower and have some hope, for some seed may fall on soil in which they will never come to maturity.

“Weeds, like the wild morning glory, form new plants not from their seed only, but from their travelling, trailing branches.

“If, then, the chances are so good for renewal of weeds, what is the plan of campaign which we should follow?  Once a German gentleman who loved and cultivated roses was asked how to get rid of rose bugs.  ’Kill them,’ he said.  ’Pick them off by hand and kill them by foot is the sure method!’ he continued.

“So, to get rid of weeds, just destroy them.  Persistently and constantly weed them out and cultivate the soil.  Clean cultivation is the only sort for good crops and freedom from weeds.

“Weeds, as flowers, drop in the three classes of annuals, biennials and perennials.  Any annual is easy enough to hold down.  Just pull such weeds up.  Some merely cut the weed off at the surface of the ground, but it is a better way to be rid of the thing entirely.  And should you not be quite sure of the kind of weed, then pulling up is the only really safe plan.  For if the weed happened to be a perennial, leaving the root in the ground would be the worst possible thing to do.

“The greatest business of all annuals is to form seed.  Now I know you wish to say that this is the business of all plants.  It is.  But with annuals there is only one chance to produce seed.  That chance is the one short year of their lives, and this is doubtless the reason why these chaps work so hard at seed forming, and produce so many seed.  Therefore, the thing evidently to be done is to make it impossible for annuals to form seed.

“The biennials and perennials must have further treatment than just that of preventing seed formation.  The underground part of such weeds must be destroyed.  For these live in the ground ready to come up again.  Biennials may be killed out by deep hoeing.  Get rid of all the young plants, keep at the older ones with the hoe and prevent seed formation, too.  Biennials are found most abundantly in waste places along woodsides and where the soil for a long time has been left undisturbed.

“Perennials need about the same treatment as biennials.  But even greater persistency should be exercised in destroying the underground portion.  For these underground plants produce new plants as surely as seeds do.  The bindweed has a creeping root, wild garlic has a bulb, and such forms are always producing new forms underground while the seed above the ground is able to do the same thing.