The daily commonwealth. (Greenwood, Leflore Co., Miss.) 1916-1919, 1917-04-25

At a rood deal Of expense and trouble the residents of West Washington
81. have put out flowers along the sidewalk on both sides OF the street.
The whole town should be interested, in this, rs it will improve the town
itself. The children are helping wonderfully by remembering not to walk
on the beds. But the grown people are not so thoughtful Several of them
having been seen walking across the beds Now, even if you do not step on
the plants, you pack the dirt around them and your skirts brush the tops OF
them, and 8 injure them. And we beg that you remember no' 70 walk
Then too someone was thoughless enough to send 2 cows and a calf down
the street The cows were led. but the calf wal loose and running along on
the flower beds, Is it fair! You see if w car just once let everybody
see how beautiful they are going to be, the whole town is gong to .
such beds next year. Won't you give u a fair chance to 40 this!
We add the following clipping IS we may have trouble in our gardens
with insects.
Tomatoes, cabbages, sweet potatoes, lettuce and other truck plants, es-
pecialy those which W started under grass and transplanted, re subject
to serious injury by cutworms. These pests appear sometimes in great num-
bers in the spring and early summer, and frequently do severe injury before
their ravages re noticed. Their method of attack is to cut off the plants
at about the surface of the ground, and IS these caterpilars ri Of large
size and voracous feeders they ar capable of destroying many plants in
a single night-frequently more than they can devour. Every year these
insects, working generally throughout the United States, have destroyed hun
dreds of thousand of dollars worth of crops. By the timely application OF
remedies, however, as has been demonstrated by entomelogists of the United
States Department Of Agriculture, they readily can be controlled even over
considerable areas. The usual method Of control is by the Use OF poisoned
Take a bushel of dry bran, and add one pound of white arsenite of lead
or Paris green and mix it thoroughly into mash with eight gallons of water
in which has been stirred half a ganon>of sorghum or other cheap molasses.
Arsenne of lead and Paris green are deadly poisons. Handle them with
great care). This amount will be sufficient for the tratment Of about four
or five acres of cultivated crops. After the mash has stood for several hours,
scatter in Jumps about the size of a marble over the fields where the injury
Is beginning to appear and about the bases of the plants set out. Apply
late in the day, Sc as to place the poison about the plants before night, which
lis the time the cutworms are active. Apply a second time if necessary.
Keep children, live stock and chickens away from this bait
When cutworms occur in unusual abundance which happens locally
and sometimes generally, they exhaust their food supply and migrate to
other fields. This they do literally in armies, assuming what is called the
army worm habit At such times it is necessary to treat them the same
as army worms. While the methods which have been advised are valuable
in such cases, they may be too slow to destroy all thecutworns, and other
methods must be employed. These include trenching, dhching, the blowing
of deep burrows in advance of the travelling cutworms to trap them, and the
dragging of logs or brush through the burrows. If the trenches can be filled
with water, the addition of a small quantity of kerosene so as to form a thin
scum IN the surface, will prove fatal to the cutworms. In extreme cases,
barriers of fence boards are erected, on the tops sneared with tar or other
sticky substances to stop the cutworms al they attempt to crawl over.
In extremely severe attacks by cutworms on choice plants there is some
times n opportunity to prepare the poisoned bait. In such cases al ar
semitic Of lead spray will answer quite "a we'll In one instance a parsley
field was sprayed with four pounds Of arsenite Of lead % so gallons of water.
this killed all the cutworms, whereas if they had been left alone for a day
or two longer the field probably would have been destroyed. The result
was a perfect stand-he best ever made by the grower. In this case five
applications were necessary
Clean cultural methods and crop rotation arr advisable, as r also fall
blowing and dsking, to prevent occurrences Of cutworm attacks.
Many cutworms can be destroyed where it is possible to overflow the
fields, particularly where irrigation is practtced,
THE COMMITTEE OF HOUSEKEEPERS.