10 



THE GENESEE FARMER. 



WALKS AND TALKS IN THE GABDEN.-No. VI. 



" Plttms have suffered less from the curculio this 

 year than usual, and if we had not so many peaches 

 they would prove quite an acceptable desert fruit. 

 Here is a fair specimen of the Diaper Rouge, 

 plucked from the tree that our friend Hochstein 

 sketched a few years since for the Rural Annual. 



DIAPER ROUGE. 



"Did you ever preserve plums in whisky? I 

 knew a lady in this city who kept a quantity of 

 Damsons by simply putting them in whisky. They 

 kept admirably, and were excellent, and the whisky 

 itself, I am told, was — not thrown away. They 

 should not be too ripe. 



" The reason why cauliflowers run up and pro- 

 duce such small heads is not owing, as I believe, to 

 the soil being too rich or too poor, too wet or too 

 dry; not to early planting or to late planting, but 

 simply and purely to bad seed. 



" Fdo not mean that the seed is bad in the sense 

 that it will not grow. The worst seed often grows 

 the best ; but it is bad seed because it has not been 

 properly bred. 



" We want thoroughbred seed just as much as 

 thoroughbred cattle; and by thoroughbred I mean 

 that it must have its desirable qualities so often re- 



peated as to become a fixed characteristic of the 

 plant. For instance : The turnip, in its wild state, 

 has little or no bulb, but runs up to seed the first 

 year. Now, suppose we had nothing but this wild 

 turnip seed, what should we have to do in order 

 to get a plant that would form a bulb and not go 

 to seed the next year? Why, we should select 

 those plants which manifested the greatest ten- 

 dency to form bulbs ; then we should allow them 

 to go to seed, pulling out all the others. From 

 this seed we should probably get a few plants with 

 a still greater tendency to form bulb ; these we 

 should save and allow them to seed, destroying all 

 the rest. By sowing this seed again, and repeat- 

 ing the process for several years, we should at 

 length get a plant with a large bulb, and which 

 did not go to seed until the following year. 



" Now, when you have gained the object of your 

 desire, after years of careful selection, what would 

 you do? Would you let all your plants go to seed, 

 whether the bulbs were large or small? If you 

 did, the plants would soon run back into their old 

 habits, and all your labor would be lost. 



" After a turnip with the desired bulb-forming 

 qualities had been obtained, you would carefully 

 save the seed and sow it. But it would bo found 

 that a few plants would still retain some of their 

 old habits of running up to seed, or at least a ten- 

 dency to do so, and it would be necessary to reject 

 all such, and to continue the process of careful 

 breeding until the desirable qualities were fixed. 



"To raise good turnip seed, it is necessary to 

 select good bulbs and transplant them. If, as is 

 now sometimes done in England, they are allowed 

 to go to seed in the drills where they are grown, 

 the plants raised from such seed will have a ten- 

 dency to run too much to top. The transplanting 

 seems to arrest this tendency. I cannot but think 

 it would be desirable for onr farmers to raise their 

 own turnip seed, instead of, as now, sowing that 

 which is imported from England, and which may 

 have been raised in the careless manner alluded to. 

 We could thus be sure of hnving good seed. 



"An instance on a large scale once came under 

 my observation, which illustrated, in a deplorable 

 manner, this tendency in the turnip to return to 

 its original habit of running up to seed the same 

 year instead of forming bulbs. John IIilditch, of 

 Stanton, sowed some fifty acres of turnips very 

 early in the season, thinking to get a larger crop 

 than by sowing later at the usual time. The plants 

 came up and grew splendidly, and everybody 

 . thought he -would have a magnificent crop ; but 



