MANURES FOR THE QUINCE. 37 
wood yield a bushel of ashes. In one hundred pounds 
of such ashes there are about sixteen pounds of potash, 
which is needful to good fruit. There are next three 
and a half pounds of soda, five and a quarter pounds of 
phosphoric acid, and sixty-seven pounds of lime and 
magnesix. A mixture of one part ashes with three parts 
of chip dirt is an excellent top dressing for the orchard. 
When the needed potash can not be had in wood ashes, 
a substitute may be made of the muriate or the sulphate 
of potash. Nitrate of soda and muriate of potash im- 
prove the quality of acid fruits. Lime is valuable in 
most soils by its solvent effects on the silica they con- 
tain. If lime be found in the ashes of a plant, it will be 
valuable as a fertilizer of that plant; and such is the 
case with all hard wood trees like the quince. It also 
improves the fruit. 
Salt is so valuable to the quince, that it must be con- 
sidered indispensable to its highest success. I no longer 
think of raising quinces without salting every spring 
before the trees begin to grow. I have learned not only 
to salt my quince trees, but my pear trees as well. It 
does them good not only in promoting a healthy growth, 
but I think acts as a preventive of the blight, to which 
both are subject. It may do this by its chlorine or by 
its soda, or by both combined, through the spongioles of 
the roots effecting a change in the sap and the wood. 
We know not how, but have found the effect favorable. 
Besides these effects it also promotes fruitfulness. I sowed 
about three quarts (the quantity for a tree large enough 
to bear a bushel) around a barren tree early one spring, 
and the year after it bore well, and so continued from 
year to year. Quince trees along the sea-coast may be 
expected to do well. Trees at Newport, Rhode Island, . 
that were set for screens in exposed places, yielded ex- 
cellent crops of very fine quinces. Salt acts as a solvent 
of other materials of fertility locked up in the soil. In 
