GRAPE CULTURE. 9 



sheltered locality of moderate elevation ; a warm, moist soil with 

 suitable plant food in it, and a system of growth of root, stem, 

 arm, cane, shoot, and cluster, which shall throw the entire plant 

 under the control and management of the viticulturist. 



The many treatises that have been published in this country 

 contain much that is valuable, but a good deal is omitted. It is 

 hardly possible to find in any one or in all, the requisites for 

 uniformly successful grape culture in the open air in New England, 

 Here, to mature the fruit, most vines need all the sunshine over 

 the roots that it is possible to give them, but no treatise directs 

 this, except for terraced localities. They need to be trained, 

 while growing, so that they can be readily laid down in winter, 

 but in most plans for training this is entirely ignored. They need 

 too, on the part of the cultivator, a system of thinning out of fruit 

 and checking of foliage, so that the smallest possible amount of 

 seed (for which alone all plants grow and expend their energies, 

 and thus exhaust themselves) is allowed to the greatest weight of 

 fruit ; so that no foliage is permitted but that wanted to matui'e the 

 fruit, and to form root, wood, and bud to carry the next year's 

 crop ; and yet what cultivator bestows on these essentials even a 

 passing thought? 



We do not wonder then, when we look around and see, and read 

 in journals of failures everywhere. The ruin wrought by cold, by 

 insects, by mildew, and by untimely overbearing, may well be 

 charged to ignorance and sheer neglect, and the noble vine, the 

 first- known plant that received culture at the hand of man, en- 

 dowed with a constitution capable of flourishing for centuries, 

 comes thus to an untimely end. Abandoned often, it is extermi- 

 nated from the garden and plowed up in the vineyard ; or, what is 

 still worse, left standing as a monument to the memor^"^ of its 

 owner's stupidity — diseased, half lifeless, with perhaps here and 

 there a few scattered berries, never destined to mature. 



I shall say little about propagation, only noting that plants 

 well grown in the open air are the most desirable, because acclima- 

 tized, and no cuttings can be better than those known as " root- 

 lings," because the white roots are in early spring drawn out from 

 the cutting without starting the leaf bud, and they are then in a 

 condition to be set out and to bud out as soon as spring opens, 

 with roots ready formed to sustain them. All vines require one 

 season's growth in the nursery before the final planting. 



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