. New elementary agriculture for rural and graded schools; an elementary text book dealing with the plants, insects, birds, weather, and animals of the farm . Fig. 15. Section of cabbage. the onion in a similar bunch of leaves, developed underground, forming the bulb. In all such cases the farmer can take advantage ofthis habit which the plant has of laying up for its ownuse; if he does not care to gather a crop of seeds fromhis parsnips or carrots or cabbages, he can let the plantdo the first half of its work and then pull it up andso stock his cellar with choice vegetables for the table. The
. New elementary agriculture for rural and graded schools; an elementary text book dealing with the plants, insects, birds, weather, and animals of the farm . Fig. 15. Section of cabbage. the onion in a similar bunch of leaves, developed underground, forming the bulb. In all such cases the farmer can take advantage ofthis habit which the plant has of laying up for its ownuse; if he does not care to gather a crop of seeds fromhis parsnips or carrots or cabbages, he can let the plantdo the first half of its work and then pull it up andso stock his cellar with choice vegetables for the table. The potato, perhaps our most important vegetable, isuseful for a similar reason, only in this case it does notstore food in the tuber for its own old age, but for itsoffspring. The potato, being in its wild state a native 30 NEW ELEMENTARY AGRICULTURE of warmer regions where the ground does not freezemuch, has adopted a rather peculiar way of propagatingitself from year to year. Although it produces flowersand seeds the same as most plants do (the seeds are. Fig. 16. Potato plant forming its tubers. found in little balls which grow at the top of the plant),it does not depend much upon these seeds for repro-ducing itself; it develops peculiar underground branches,whose tips thicken and form the tubers, and it is thebuds, or eyes as they are called, in these tubers fromwhich the new crop will grow. So, wisely, the parent DIFFERENT CLASSES OF FARM PLANTS 3 I plant stores plenty of food in these tubers for the youngpotatoes to live upon until they can push up aboveground and develop leaves and branches of their when the parent plant dies down in the autumn,these underground branches, or tubers, live to reproducethe plant another year. In our part of the world, ofcourse, the ground freezes too severely during the winterfor the safety of these tubers, so, as the farmer has broughtthe potato from its warmer native regions to our lesshospitable climate, of course he must not neglec
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectagriculture, bookyear
