48 THE FARMER'S MANUAL* 



your fruit-trees to be unthrifty, or hide-bound, slit the 

 bark with the point of your pen-knife, upon 4 sides, 

 through the outer, but not through the inner bark 

 (particularly stone fruit, which will destroy your 

 trees,) from the ground up, as high as you can reach, 

 and dress with a corn-basket full of chip dung, about 

 the roots and near to the trunk of the tree, you will 

 soon perceive the good effects. 



Open, and ventilate your cellars, and clear them 

 out for the season, and rinse clean, and bung tight all 

 such cider-casks, as you wish to preserve sweet in 

 your cellars over the summer, and free from must. 



Weeds. 



These are our common enemy, and nature has ar- 

 rayed a host against us, consisting of more than fifty 

 different nations of weeds, as marauders, to destroy 

 our labours, and rob us of our crops. They enter 

 our gardens and corn-fields unobserved, by night, 

 and by day ; they pillage, waste and destroy, more 

 of our property than all the rest of our enemies, ex- 

 cepting rum and tobacco. Let us set our faces 

 against them, watch them close, and extirpate the 

 first, radically from our corn-fields, and the latter 

 from our houses ; then, and not till then, shall we 

 have peace and plenty, with the voice of health, both 

 in our borders, and in our dwellings. 



Weeds are a noxious growth, quicker and more 

 succulent than any of the grains, they therefore ex- 

 haust the soil more, and quicker than the grains, and 

 they also rob all plants in their vicinity, of the ferti- 

 lizing properties of the air, and thus doubly destroy 

 your crop and interest. If you wish for any illus- 

 tration upon this idea of nutrition afforded to plants 

 from the air, examine such small trees as grow conti- 

 guous to large ones, or such corn or other herbage as 

 growSnear to a tree, or other corn, or herbage, which 

 is greater ; the lesser will take their growth in a di- 



