270 THE FLORIST AND POMOLOaiST. [ DECEJrBER, 



sometimes over-dose our patient, and as a consequence, we get flaggy vegetables, 

 in whicli a sensitive palate can detect something that suggests a less cleanly place 

 than a garden. The use of burnt earth and charred vegetable waste and char- 

 coal to potato, carrot, and onion crops may, in most cases, be advantageously 

 pursued, and such a dressing will have a permanently beneficial effect. The 

 occasional use of lime, if properly selected, will be of great advantage ; the gritty 

 limes from the oolites are better than the stronger liassic limes, and chalk-lime is 

 to be preferred to that made from magnesium stone. 



One remedy for the exhaustion of available silicates is unfortunately not 

 generally attainable. It is the granite chippings and dust that is formed so 

 largely in quarries where that material is worked, and which, though cheap in 

 the district, would be dear sent to a great distance. This is an admirable dress- 

 ing, and its value to Fruit-trees is incontestable. The Jersey fruit-gardens rest 

 upon granitic detritus, and continue to produce fruit of unfailing excellence. 



The practice I have pursued for many years, of bringing up during the 

 winter digging a certain amount of fresh material from the sub-soil — in my case 

 a strong clay — and spreading as much over the surface as will afford a fair 

 dressing, and no more than the weather can operate upon and pulverise, has the 

 double effect of deepening the culture and fertilising the land. I take care to 

 spread a pretty good dressing of burnt earth over the crumbling masses of clay, 

 to prevent subsequent coherence. 



But after all, the applications I have alluded to are, it is true, in relation to 

 Vegetables, but temporary dressings, which give a definite amount of assistance to 

 the compound in which a long course of doctoring has made a healthy and 

 naturally fertile action more and more difficult. There remains, then, the uni- 

 versal prescription for exhaustion — rest ; rest from that system of cropping which 

 has gone on probably for a century ; rest also from the physicking of dung, and 

 from the teasing and upturning of the spade. I do not mean absolute rest, for 

 Nature in her operations is never still, but a change of system which amounts to a 

 rest ; and this may be accomplished by ' laying down,' as they say in farming, the 

 quarters of the kitchen garden for some seasons, not allowing weeds, on account 

 of the legacy of seed they would leave, but cropping the ground with some close- 

 growing, deep-rooting perennial or biennial plant, as Broom, Sainfoin, Lucerne, 

 Flax, or any vigorous native plants that would scour the ground of its grossness, 

 tend to open up its sub-soil by sending their deeply penetrating roots into it, 

 liberate mineral fertilisers by vegetable action, and clear the ground of the in- 

 numerable insect plagues, which find happy hunting-grounds in the garden soil, 

 and in the sweet and succulent crops which are groAvn within it. Deprived of 

 their accustomed food, and the circumstances that favoured their pi'opagation, 

 those great and permanent jiests, the carrot-worm, the potato-grub, and the small 

 centipede, would be checked in their ravages, and would perish. 



It may seem a little inconsistent with any progressive system of cultivation, 

 to recommend a plan that is commonly pursued by the peasant proprietors of 



