A FIELD OF LEEKS IN BUD

but once and that deeply, but did no harrowing or stirring of the soil save what was necessary to even up the ground for the planting. He

used no fertilizer and no water for irrigation. The soil of the valley, washed down from the mountains for unnumbered generations, was, for all practical purposes, bottomless, inexhaustible. And while no rains come from early spring to early (and sometimes late) winter, the soil conserves the moisture for the long rainless summer and measures it out unstintingly to the thirsty plants. Here and there are patches where it pays to irrigate in dry seasons, but these are the exceptions.

HARVESTING AND TESTING THE SEEDS

In July, August, and early September the harvest of the seeds is on. The scene is far different then, full of a peculiar beauty. The great valley is a mass of bloom where the flowers grow, and where the vegetable seeds are ripening stretch wide reaches of color-green and brown and gold and gray-while in the background the huge oaks in their dark rich green throw into relief the distant brown foothills leading up to the dark chaparral of the mountains beyond. Some seeds must be threshed out with machines in the way wheat is threshed; others must come under the old-fashioned flail. Lettuce, for example, is gathered in squares or sacks of cloth by the workmen, after

the upper part of the plant containing the seed has been cut off, and is then placed on wide pieces of canvas, about thirty feet square stretching down the field. When the plants have dried out sufficiently-the tops are turned by hand every day for a fortnight-the flails begin their work. Experts, indeed, are some of these brawny Chinamen at this ancient mode of threshing. There is no danger that the seed will spoil overnight if the flailers have not finished when the day ends, for it is the time of no rain from moon's end to moon's end.

After the threshing, the seed is sacked and stored or sent out over the world direct. Shipments go to many foreign countries-to Continental Europe and England largely, to Japan, China, Australia. The shipping season is October, November,and December; then comes January's planting, and the cycle of the seeds begins once more.

But there is another factor in the success of this steadily broadening enterprise-the seeds must be good seeds. You cannot run a seed farm without raising good seeds. So there are testing plots where acres are given up to growing seeds for test-as to vitality, absence

they might be called, will be growing at a single time; and most earnest study of them is always made in order to find one plant radically different from others of its race in some one essential which makes it more novel or more excellent than any of its forebears. It is the one rare new plant that makes all the care worth while.

There is an exceedingly clever Chinese plantbreeder-Henry Ohn, they have named himwho has been very successful in originating new varieties of sweet peas, a long list standing to his credit. He is a man of rare perceptions, quick to note a new type, extremely deft in breeding together two old plants to make, if possible, a third one rarer than either parent.

Courtesy of the Braslin Seed Co.

DWARF SWEET PEAS GROWING FOR SEED

which will not show an 86 per cent. germination test, while the greater part of all seeds sent will show from 90 to 95 per cent. Some seeds test a full 100 per cent.-that is to say, every seed in the sack will germinate.

THE PRODUCTION OF NEW VARIETIES

The experimental grounds where new varieties are constantly being tested are important features of the seed ranches. Should a new kind of lettuce, a new radish, or a new flower of any type be developed as a result of the work done on the experimental plots, it may prove of large commercial value. More than a thousand varieties of a single plant, variations

SEED SACKED FOR THE WAREHOUSE

WHERE SEEDS ARE CLEANED AND SACKED

Perhaps an average ranch will raise seeds in this general proportion: Onions, 1,000 acres; lettuce, 500 acres; carrots, 200 acres; radishes, 2co acres; sweet peas, 400 to 500 acres; beets, celery, parsley, leeks, and other vegetable and flower varieties, from one acre to fifty acres. One farm has a single field of onions covering 640 acres, a square mile!

The volume of business is steadily growing. A conservative estimate of the value in carload lots of the seeds raised each year in this valley is $1,200,000. The value of the seeds as sold at retail in packages ranging from an ounce to two or three pounds is very largely in excess of this figure.

I

N THE last annual report of the Secretary of War are three paragraphs that should have been printed in red ink.

The first gives the number of enlistments during the fiscal year-24,083-and adds that 8,849 of this number were reënlistments. That means that of the men added to the nation's fighting force, two of every three were "fresh fish"-untrained, unseasoned men.

The second item is this:

"Notwithstanding most indefatigable efforts on the part of recruiting officers, the needs for recruits during the past fiscal year could not be fully met, and the difficulty increased rather than abated, as compared with the year before."

The third paragraph should have been printed in bold-faced type:

"The relative number of desertions in the Army has continued to increase, the number for the past fiscal year being 7.4 per cent. of the whole number of enlisted men in service during that year, as against 6.8 per cent. during the preceding year. The average for the three years 1902-1904 was 6.1 per cent., and for the ten years 18951904 the average was 4.5 per cent. of the total number of enlisted men in the service."

Expressed in units of men rather than in percentages, this means that within a year

6,258 men of the regular army deserted its ranks! Enough to make eight whole regiments!

This shame for it is nothing less-is not the shame of the army alone. It comes home to the entire nation, for nine of every ten deserters were of native birth.

What is the matter with the army-that its seasoned men will not reënlist; that suitable recruits cannot be found in numbers sufficiently large, and that soldiers enough to make eight regiments were so sick of the service that they were willing to go through life with the army's most despised crime seared upon their consciences rather than wear the uniform longer?

The report of the Honorable Secretary does not intimate that anything is seriously wrong with the army, but a further paragraph gives a clue:

"Fifty-eight per cent. of all the desertions during the year were desertions of men in their first year of service, and considerably more than half of these desertions were during the first six months of service. Sixteen per cent. of the desertions occurred among men in their second year of service, and 3 per cent. among those in their third year, making a total of 77 per cent. during the first enlistment."

Since more than half of all the desertions occurred during the first year of enlistment, it is evident that recruits do not find army life