A CHEAP PIT FOR GREEN-HOUSE PLANTS. 



A CHEAP PIT FOR GREEN-HOUSE PLANTS. 



BY AN ORIGINAL SUBSCRIBER, NEW- YORK. 



Dear Sir — I take it for granted that there are a good many among your readers, who, 

 like myself, love gardens, and are too poor to have all the luxuries that belong to them. 

 Among these luxuries I count green-houses and hot-houses. Now, as I dont spend fifty 

 dollars a year on my garden, besides my own labor, it is not to be supposed that I have 

 any such " Crystal palaces." Yet I contrive by the aid of cheap pits or frames, sunk in 

 a dry warm part of my garden — under the south side of a board fence, to keep through 

 the winter all the half-hardy plants, such as tea-roses, carnations, petunias, heliotropes, 

 and most of the hard-wooded green-house plants that adorn the garden, and keep it gay 

 in summer. Chinese Azaleas do even better in these pots, than they do in green-houses. 

 To make such frames, it is only needful to choose a piece of ground that is Avell drain- 

 ed, to have a few good hot-bed sashes, to make a frame or bottomless box, out of some 

 rough boards, as wide as the sashes are long, and as long as the sum total of feet that 

 your sashes will cover if laid side by side. Sink the frame in the ground to its level, 

 within two inches at the front, and three inches at the back, so as to make the needful 

 slope to carry off the rain. Dig out the soil for two feet deep. Spread a couple of inches of 

 small stones, or coal ashes at the bottom, and set the pots upon this. Give as much light 

 and air as you can until severe frosty weather sets in. In downright winter weather 

 keep the frames shut pretty close, covering the glass at night with several thicknesses of 

 matting or old canvas bagging — and in very hard frost, with a few bundles of straw in 

 addition. Water only when the pots appear somewhat dry — but then water freely — 

 especially if the weather is such that you can keep the frame open for an hour or 

 more. 



In this way, almost all the popular and showy green-house plants may, as I have said, 

 be wintered in excellent condition, at very trifling expense, no artificial heat, whatever, 

 being required. Wishing, however, last winter, to do something new, and have a few re- 

 ally tender exotics in a pit, I hit upon a cheap and simple sort of warming apparatus, 

 which succeeded quite to my satisfaction, and I must therefore describe it to you. 



My heating apparatus was a large flat, tin lamp, with a common candle wick — the lamp 

 large enough to hold a pint of alcohol — for this was to be my fuel. Over this lamp, at 

 the distance of an inch and a half, was suspended or fixed my boiler — about six by eight 

 inches, also tin. Out of the side of this boiler, about one-third of the way down, started 

 a tin pipe, one inch in diameter, tightly soldered to the boiler, and also at every joint. 

 This pipe ran quite round the frame, (suspended a little way from the board by a wooden 

 bracket,) and finally entered the boiler again near the bottom, on the side opposite where 

 it went out. The boiler itself was soldered quite tight, and the whole pipe was quite 

 tight — with the exception of one place; this was the first elbow after it left the boiler — 

 one-third of the way round. Here it had an upright joint soldered on, reaching up to near 

 the glass — say two inches higher than the level of the water in the boiler. This upright 

 joint was open at the top, and into this opening I daily poured the water to fill the boiler, 

 pipe and all — for you see it was in fact all one boiler. I had then, as your readers well 

 versed in hot-water heating, will see at a glance, a modern hot- water apparatus — on a mi 

 niature scale, at a very low price, such as can be made in a few hours by any tinman 

 pence worth of alcohol would carry my hot-water apparatus through the coldest 



