298 POTTING AND REPOTTING OR SHIFTING. 



quence of which it is always dry, and not liable to be chilled by eva- 

 poration, or rotted off by the stagnation of moisture ; and the second 

 consists in mixing with the soil fragments of any coarse, porous 

 stone, such as freestone, from one inch to three inches in diameter, 

 which retaining more moisture than the soil, gives it out to the latter 

 when it becomes too dry; and thus a temporary neglect of watering is 

 not attended with the sudden destruction of the plant, which without 

 these reservoirs of moisture it often is. 



Mr. Barnes, late of Bicton, has been in the habit of using rough, rooty, 

 unsifted soil for upwards of twenty years, and of introducing a portion 

 of charcoal among such soil for more than twelve years. He was led 

 to use charcoal from observing, in a wood where charcoal had been 

 burned, the great luxuriance of the weeds around the margins of the 

 places where the charcoal heaps had been, and where a thin sprinkling 

 of charcoal dust had got amongst the weeds. He got a basketful of 

 this dust, and tried it first among cucumber soil. He found it im- 

 proved the plants in strength and colour, and then began trying it with 

 other soft-growing plants ; and he has continued trying it ever since 

 with thousands of plants under pot-culture, and with most kitchen- 

 garden crops. Mr. Barnes finds the following a good plan to make a 

 rough sort of charcoal for use in the kitchen-garden. When made, it 

 must be kept dry ; and when seed is sown in the open garden, the 

 charcoal must be put into the drills along with it, at the rate of three 

 or four pints of powdered charcoal to a drill of a hundred feet in 

 length. 



Collect a quantity of rubbish together, such as trimmings of bushes, 

 cabbage and broccoli stalks, old pine-apple stems, and such other parts 

 of plants as will not readily rot; put these together, laying some straw 

 beneath them, and set the straw on fire. The straw must be so laid, 

 that the fire can run into the middle of the heap. When the heap 

 is completed, cover it over with short, close, moist rubbish, such as 

 short grass, weeds, and earth, from the rubbish-heap, in order to keep 

 the flame from flaring through at any one place for any length of time. 

 As soon as the fire breaks through in a blaze, throw on more short 

 rubbish, so as to check the flames. It is necessary to thrust a stake or 

 broom-handle into the heap in different places, in order to encourage 

 the fire to burn regularly through it ; but as soon as the flames burst 

 through these holes, stop them up, and make others where you think 

 the heap is not burning. When it is all burned, collect the whole of 

 the charred rubbish, ashes, &c., sift it through different- sized sieves, 

 and put the sizes separately into old casks or boxes, keeping these 

 boxes constantly in a dry place. In Mr. Barnes's potting-shed we 

 observed four different sizes of charcoal (considering charcoal dust as 

 one size); sods of heath-soil; different kinds of loam; leaf-mould; pots 

 filled with four different sizes of pebbles, from the size of a grain of 

 wheat to the width of the palm of the hand ; four different sizes of broken 

 freestone ; four different sorts of sand ; two sizes of bone one of half 

 inch pieces, and the other of bone-dust ; four different sizes of broken 

 pots for draining ; different sizes of shards for putting over the holes 



