434 



NEW ENGLAND FARMER. 



Sept. 



ting out, and at five or six years, if well cultivated, 

 will afford a bushel or so to each tree. A portion 

 of a garden as large as the tenth of an acre, may 

 be planted with forty or fifty trees, without crowd- 

 ing. All the different varieties of the apple may 

 be made Dwarfs by working on the Paradise or 

 Doucain stock — the former are smaller and bear 

 soonest; the latter are larger and ultimately 

 afford the heaviest crops. Among the handsomest 

 growers as dwarfs, are Red Astrachan, Jersey 

 Sweet, Porter, Baldwin, Dyer, Summer Rose, Be- 

 noni, and Bough." 



"Sandy land" is rather an indefinite term. Most 

 of our land is more or less sandy. A hungry light 

 sand is not good for apple trees, neither is a heavy 

 clay. Potatoes and corn famish about as good an 

 analysis of soils for apple trees as any of our chem- 

 ists can. Wherever they grow well we expect 

 that apple trees will do the same. 



USES OF SORREL. 



It is so seldom that editors ask advice of their 

 readers — and I suppose it is not often they need it 

 — that I willingly take an hour, whilst my hay is 

 drying, to answer your three or four questions 

 about sorrel. We should not question but what 

 God's wisdom can be discerned in the creation of 

 sorrel. In my boyhood I was told that farmers 

 when they could not gtt hay seed, would sow sorrd 

 seed, in preference to letting their land lay barren. 

 I remember reading, in years gone by, in some 

 agricultural paper, an article in which the writer 

 stated that he ground up a large lot of sorrel seed 

 for his swine, and found it almost equal to other 

 grain. 



Now, for my own experience. Some years since, 

 having a piece of land covered with sorrel, I told 

 my hired man one cloudy day to mow the sorrel 

 and put it into cocks. It was done; and it re- 

 maintd there till planting time the next year. I 

 hardly knew what to do with it; but being about 

 to plant a field of potatoes, I took the sorrel, and 

 put the same amount in bulk into the hill that I 

 should of manure, and planted the potatoes. The 

 potatoes and sorrel came up about the same time. 

 The !^orrel, however, came so thick that but a sm- 

 gie leaf could grow from a seed, and the leaves 

 were so crowded that they grew very slowly. 

 When the potatoes were about three inches high, 

 the sorrel was but about one inch high. I ploughed 

 between the rows, — as I do for all hoei crops, — 

 running the land side close to the row, leaving a 

 ridge of fine mauld near the plant. I then with 

 the hoe covered the sorrel, and that was the last 

 seen of it. The labor was no more than with othe r 

 manure, and the crop was equally as good. 



Robert Mansfield. 



Wellesley, Mass., July 12, 1869. 



Remarks. — We are glad to look once more on 

 the firm, round penmanship of our old fiiend. 

 We were almost afraid he had forgotten the New 

 England Farmer. Possessing the happy faculty 

 of looking on the bright side of things generally, 

 and of fdrniing in particular, his communications 

 are always acceptable and cheering. Even sorrel 

 is not all dark, nor all sour to him. The seed is 

 good for fattening pigs, and the hay for making 

 potatoes grow ! Surely nothing is made in vain. 

 We are so pleased with his prompt answers to our 

 inquiries, though right in hay time, that we can 

 afford to smile at the sly joke he perpetrates at 



our expense, by saying that editors seldom ask or 

 need the advice of their readers. If we had 

 printed a single paper during the past ten years 

 without asking their advice, or without showing 

 very plainly that we needed it, we might have 

 taken it all in sober earnest. But when our own 

 often repeated appeals for the advice of our read- 

 ers are backed by the much used formula of our 

 correspondents — "Can you or some of the readers 

 of the Farmer inform me,"&c., — we cannot think 

 there was any need that friend Mansfield should 

 put Josh Billing's "Nota bene, this is sarcasm," at 

 the close of his first sentence. But, "the wounded 

 bird flutters!" Not at all; our correspondent 

 must have meant somebody else. 



frog-spittle insects. 

 In connection with an article written by E. K. 

 Baxter, of Sharon, Vt., and published in the Far- 

 mer of May 22, (Monthly, page 329), we requested 

 our correspondent, I. B. Hartwell, Esq ,of Wilkin- 

 sonville, Mass., to reply more fully than we did to 

 Mr. Baxter's inquiries. Mr. Hartwell kindly re- 

 sponds by saying that not being able to add any val- 

 uable information himself, he called the attention of 

 Prof. B. D. Walsh, editor of the American Ento- 

 mologist, to Mr. Baxter's article. In that valuable 

 magazine for July, we find the following reply : — 



The frog-spittle insects belong to the genus 

 Aphrophora in the Cercopis Family of the Order of 

 the Whole-winged Bugs (ffowop^era.) We have 

 ourselves found the Aphrophora quadrangular is of 

 Say very abundant in the larva, and occasionally 

 in the perfect winged state, in the well known 

 "frog spittle" upon grass and various weeds grow- 

 ing among grass. Usually but a single larva is 

 found in a single mass of "frog-spittle," and of 

 course this so-called "fro'g-spittle" is nothing but 

 the sap pumped out of the infVsted plant and dis- 

 charged ironi the body of the larva. The perfect 

 insect, which is fully one-quarter of an inch long, 

 is of a pale dull brown color with oblique bands of 

 dark brown ; but the larva is of a shining black 

 color with pale yellow markings, so as to be very 

 unlike the winsred fly. Thcic are several other 

 species of Fiogspittle insects, one of which inhab- 

 its in great numhers the twigs of the Red 0-ier 

 Dogwood. Mr. E. K. Baxter, of Sharon, Vt., 

 writes, as you point out, in the New England 

 Farmer of May 22, 18()9, that some species or 

 other belonging to this s^enus of insects "has done 

 much damage in Vermont to the hay crop during 

 the past two or three years," anfl that it is iwiieved 

 by some that in consequence of its depredations 

 tlie quantity of hay grown on some fields was one- 

 third less, to say noihingof the dcpreiiatioji in the 

 quality of the crop." This is perfectly possible, 

 provided that the insects were sufficiently al)un- 

 dant; but we ourselves have never met wiih them 

 in any such exuberant numbers. — American Ento- 

 mologist. 



The editor of the Mirror and Farmer speaks of a 

 field on which the frog-spittle or "snake foam" was 

 so abundant that in spots the ground seemed 

 white with it. We under.^tand that some farmers 

 ascribe the unusual f.itaity among sheep last win- 

 ter to the unusual abundance of this froth or foam 

 on the grass last season. But as we saw more or 

 less of it on grass many years ago, we can hardly 

 believe it is puisonous to stock. Dr. Hartwell 



