Continuous cropping in wheat for many years has fostered the growth of the wild-oats, now a great disfigurement and drawback to the wheat-crop in this valley. Traveling north to Portland by train, this last harvest, it was sometimes even hard to say whether wheat or wild-oats were intended to be grown. Nothing but summer fallowing, thoroughly applied and regularly followed, can remedy this. I have known a farmer to send his wheat to the mill, and get back half the quantity in wild-oats. To the timothy-hay fields a noxious plant called "tar-weed" is the great enemy on all damp or low-lying spots. The plant was new to us, but, once seen, is never forgotten. Fortunately, it matures later than the timothy, and so does not get its seeds transferred; but it is almost disgusting to see the skins and noses of the horses and cattle turned into the field when the hay is off, coated with a glutinous, viscid gum, to which every speck of dust, every flying seed of weeds, sticks all too tightly. Plowing up the field, and summer fallowing, are the only remedies when the tar-weed gets too bad to endure. Tar-weed is an annual which grows some eight or ten inches high, one stalk from each seed; short, narrow, hairy leaves of a dingy green and a tiny colorless flower offer no compensation in beauty for the annoyance it occasions as you pass through the field, and find boots and trousers coated with the sticky gum. It is a relief to know that it affects the valley only, and does not mount even the lower hills of the Cascade and Coast Ranges. Before leaving the subject of harvesting I ought to give the cost. It is not now the question of the capitalist who can afford to pay from $750 to $1,200 for his thrashing-machine in addition to $320 for his self-binding harvester to cut his grain; but of the struggling farmer, who has to make both ends meet by economy and fore-thought. We will suppose that he has seventy acres of wheat to harvest, and that it will produce twenty bushels to the acre, a moderate suggestion. [Sidenote: _COST OF HARVESTING._] The cutting and binding in sheaves of the crop by a neighbor's self-binder will cost him $1.25 per acre, the contractor supplying the wire. The machine will cut and bind nearly ten acres a day; the cost, therefore, for the seventy acres will be $87.50, or say $90, to be safe. The thrashing will cost him six cents a bushel for his wheat, or $84 for his fourteen hundred bushels; and the farmer has to supply food for the men and horses whose services he hires. This expense will naturally vary according to the liberality and good management of the farmer and his wife. It falls heavily on the hostess to provide for seven or eight hungry men, in addition to her own family; but plentiful food, well cooked, is no bad investment, for it reacts strongly on both the quantity and the quality of the work done.