1870.] ABOUT POTATOES. 449 



should have plenty of room. The outside branches should be kept 

 tied out in order that the centre shoots may have all the light and 

 air possible. With every attention to tying out, however, the plants, 

 from their peculiar close habit of growth, are very apt to become 

 crowded in the branches ; then it is a good plan to thin out a few of 

 the under leaves from the centre of the plants, which will lessen the 

 tendency to become drawn. 



The experience of the most successful cultivators points to such a 

 compost as that formed of the following ingredients as the most suit- 

 able for specimen plants of Fancy Pelargoniums : — Equal parts turfy 

 loam, peat, and well-decomposed cow and horse dung, adding silver- 

 sand freely. The pots should be well drained with charcoal and 

 broken oyster - shells. Some cultivators mingle a little rough peat 

 with their soil, and add also oyster-shells broken into small pieces. 

 In potting, the Fancy kinds should be kept higher in the pot than the 

 large flowering Pelargoniums; what is termed the "collar" of the plant 

 should be level with the surface of the soil in which it is planted. 



Great attention should be paid to watering. Better to have the 

 plants too dry than too wet ; the first can soon be remedied, the last 

 scarcely at all. The roots of the Fancies, being of a much finer and 

 more delicate character than those of the stronger-growing class, are 

 seriously and speedily affected by an excess of moisture. In their 

 culture, one very important point is often neglected — namely, cleanli- 

 ness. There must not be either damp, mildew, or aphides suffered to 

 accumulate. Either or all of these can be kept under by the use of 

 timely precautions. Damp will bring mildew, and want of cleanli- 

 ness will engender green-fly. There is no mystery whatever in pro- 

 ducing the splendid specimens of Fancy Pelargoniums seen at the 

 London exhibitions ; attention to a few easily accomplished rules is 

 all that is required, with a little watchful intelligence presiding over 

 and directing their application. 



ABOUT POTATOES. 



"Many of them of good size, but very coarse," was the critical judgment lately 

 passed upon a large collection of some fifty kinds of Potatoes that were staged at 

 one of the meetings of the Royal Horticultural Society at South Kensington. 

 This critique was just, but not sufficiently severe ; for if it had proceeded to 

 denounce in strong terms the far too prevalent practice of growing, and especially 

 of staging for exhibition, the huge, ungainly, sunken-eyed, and altogether " coarse" 

 samples of our noble tuber that some people seem to think the ne iplus ultra of 

 Potato culture, then would a service have been rendered to horticultural taste, 

 and possibly our eyes might soon be rid of the sight of those ugly monstrosities 



