In breaking up the hard soil, or “cultivating,” the weeds are destroyed, but hard soil is a worse enemy of plant babies than weeds even, although every child knows how dreadful it is for a garden to let weeds steal all the food from the baby plants. { air, Baby plants need { food, { moisture. Now if there is a hard crust of soil around the roots, they cannot get the _air_; so we _cultivate_ or break up the hard soil to give them air. Baby plants cannot get _food_ if big strong weeds steal it from them; so we _cultivate_ to kill the weeds. Baby plants need _moisture_, perhaps more than anything else, so we cultivate; for cultivating keeps in the moisture that is down in the soil. I will explain this in a very little while. So you see _Cultivating_ is the most important garden work. WATERING Perhaps you think watering the garden most important. If so, you are mistaken. Yes, the garden must be watered from time to time; but when it is watered it should be drenched soaking wet, never sprinkled a little every day or two. One soaking in a week is better than a light sprinkling every day. Light sprinkling brings the roots to the surface, where the sun dries them up in a short time. On the other hand, the rain or a thorough drenching soaks down, down, down, into the earth, where it is stored up for future use. THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTIVATING Now, I am going to tell you why cultivating is so important in regard to moisture. If the soil is all soft and fine and loose, the rain can easily run down through it to the roots. If it were hard, the water would run off to lower ground. That’s easily understood. But immediately after the rain, when the sun comes out and the wind blows, the surface of the soil begins to dry. Then the sun “coaxes” and “pulls” the water up, up, up, to the surface it has dried, something like the way you pull the juice of an orange up through a stick of lemon candy. Now let me ask you—could you pull much orange juice through the stick of candy if the stick of candy were crumbled or broken apart at the top? No, you could not. Neither can the sun pull the moisture up through the tiny little tubes in the soil if we break those little tubes and crumble the tops into dust. No, you need not look for these tubes, Mary Frances; they are too tiny for you to see, but they act very much like blotting paper to bring the under moisture up to the surface, and unless they are broken and crumbled, the deep earth moisture goes sailing off into the air to meet the sun, as fast as if it ran out of a little spigot running it off, and the poor plant baby dries up for want of deep moisture near its roots. How shall we break these tubes (the sun’s lemon candy stick)?