STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 16T 



such tropicals as cucumbers, melons, tomatoes, &c., often find 

 these plants depreciating in their hands, and they need to renew 

 their seed from the gardens of more careful cultivators. 



In a careful selection of dry warm soils for tropicals, with the 

 use of hot beds in forwarding the more tender of them, and the 

 careful selection of well ripened and perfect fruits for seed, I 

 have found their vigor not only sustained, but often improved. 

 The occasional infelicitous influence of an unfavorable cold season, 

 like 1848, or a very dry one like 1854, is usually retrieved in 

 the succeeding year. On the other hand in the cultivation of a 

 plant like the sugar cane, in a climate a little too cool and irreg- 

 ular, and a season too short, and by unwise choice of seed 

 cuttings, it seems impossible to save the plant from eventual and 

 rapid depreciation. 



Amid the imperfections of soil, season and culture, even our 

 hardiest perennial fruits and vegetables eventually depreciate, and 

 need renewal from the seed, whatever may be said of the dura- 

 bility of such perennials under supposed modes of culture. 



b. Manuring. — Whatever gives rapid development to vegetation, 

 results in the disproportionate production of cellular tissue over 

 woody fiber, and thus exhibits a watery and tender state of the 

 plant. This difference is made strikingly apparent wherever the 

 gardener, in the spring, forwards some cabbage plants in a hot bed 

 and others in open culture. On transplanting both, on the same day 

 and into the same soil, it will be found that the plants raised in 

 open culture, though smaller in size, will have a decided advan- 

 tage should the subsequent weather happen to be cold and change- 

 ful. Even hardy plants, as wheat, barley and oats, in cold and 

 irregular, but much more in hot, damp weather, are more 

 liable to rusts and mildews, when overgrown in highly manured 

 soils, than when grown in a soil of medium fertility. 



Again, the influence of a highly manured soil drives the expan- 

 sion of the plant too far, and does not always permit the formation 

 of flowers and the setting of fruit sufficiently early. In iSS-i I 

 set a row of tomatoes in my garden, beginning at the rich, moist 

 termination of a sink-drain, and retiring from it in a direction up 

 hill into drier and poorer soil. My fruit began to ripen on the 

 top of the hill, and gradually descended towards the sink-drain, 

 the last three or four hills not maturing a single fruit. Every 



