44 THE NEW HORTICULTURE. 



the Spanish fly or blister beetle, the boll worm, so destructive 

 in Mississippi and elsewhere, not yet having done serious 

 damage. About the last of May, the time the Spanish fly 

 may be looked for, it is well to go over the patch early every 

 morning, as they invariably fly at night, and always settle in 

 a bunch over a few plants at first. They can then be easily 

 driven into the furrows and covered with earth by the spade 

 and tramped ; or, if two teaspoonfuls of Paris green are well 

 stirred in a bucket of water and sprayed over the few affected 

 plants, most of the flies will eat and die. 



As to picking, packing, etc., it is hardly necessary to say 

 more than that it always pays to put good, sound fruit of uni- 

 form size and ripeness in the same box, and except very early, 

 ship only first-class fruit. 



I will now close my remarks on the tomato with an account 

 of a most remarkable instance of the effects of electricity on 

 vegetable life, a parallel to which I have never heard or read 

 of. As the electricity could not have acted directly on the 

 tomato plants, seeing that those on the opposite side of a 

 fence were unhurt, there is only one solution, viz., the almost 

 instantaneous generation of millions of bacteria in the sap 

 and leaves of the plants, somewhat similar to blight in the 

 pear. The effect of such an excessive application of ammonia 

 to the soil, and so little phosphoric acid and potash in pro- 

 portion, was evidently to produce a peculiar sensitive, per- 

 haps attenuated, so to say, state of the sap, upon which the 

 electricity acted as a disorganizer, by furnishing the proper 

 conditions for the rapid development of the tomato bacteria, 

 just as a sudden lowering of the temperature in the winter, 

 when the sap happens to be in motion, affords the most fa- 

 vorable conditions for those of the pear. But to the facts. 

 A few years after embarking in the business, and the first 

 time I ever used cotton seed as a fertilizer, having bought ten 

 tons of damaged whole seed very cheap, and ignorant of the 

 true principles of fertilizing, I undertook to grow an acre of 

 tomatoes, to which I had applied three tons of whole seed 

 and plowed them in well. The plants made a most phenom- 

 enal growth, running and climbing all over each other, more 



