20 FOREIGN MODES OF CULTIVATING 



The gardeners there are by no means so particular 

 in the article of soil, as many are in this country ; 

 their object seems to be to make it rich and free ; 

 without being very anxious as to employing virgin 

 soil only, or any particular kind of dung. They 

 generally, however, keep the mixture some time in 

 heaps, and turn it over once or twice before using it. 

 At the same time we have seen them shifting Pines, 

 and using a black rich earth newly dug out of an 

 adjoining plat of turnips ; only mixing it with a 

 little rotten dung and white sand. 



They shift their plants in spring, and refresh the 

 surfaces of the pots in autumn, and they seem on the 

 whole to fruit them in larger pots than we do ; but 

 they leave off shifting them nine or ten months be- 

 fore the fruit is expected to appear, wishing to have 

 the pots filled with roots at this crisis. They sel- 

 dom fruit a crown plant under two years, and more 

 generally three, from the time it is taken from the 

 fruit ; large suckers they fruit earlier, according 

 to their size when taken off the mother plant ; some 

 which come out from near the bottom of the stem 

 they earth up, and do not take off at all. These 

 come early into fruit, but it is not large. 



SECT. II. 



Culture of the Pine Apple in Germany. 



THE Germans took their horticulture from the 

 Dutch, as they did their landscape gardening from 



