1900 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



541 



prices they are paid for hot house tomatoes 

 near large cities will pay very well for build- 

 ing a house and running it exclusively for to- 

 matoes. They are certainly as fine as if not 

 finer than any grown in the open air. I know 

 this through the kind courtesy of Prof. Green's 

 good wife, who invited me to their home to 

 dinner. 



The flower that took my attention more than 

 any thing else was the gloxinia. The speci- 

 mens were grown from seed ; and one package 

 of seed gave variations that were not only 

 wonderful in their beauty, but as you examine 

 first one and then the other you can hardly 

 tell which is the loveliest. Oftentimes I have 

 wondered and pondered that a little insignifi- 

 cant-looking seed should have wrapped up in 

 its little self the elements of such wonderful 

 beauty ; and when we see that there are hard- 

 ly any two exactly alike, it makes one feel 

 (especially with the gloxinia) as if nature had 

 been using her wonderful skill to hold up be- 

 fore your face one form of tantalizing beauty 

 and then another, until you are almost bewil- 

 dered with the gorgeous coloring and graceful 

 and fantastic shapes of her creation. We are 

 trying to grow gloxinias from bulbs in our own 

 greenhouse. They do not just like our meth- 

 od of treatment, or something else is the mat- 

 ter. A bougainvillia vine was arched over the 

 entrance leading to one of the greenhouses, 

 and it brought forth exclamations of delight. 

 What a very bright and sprightly plant this is! 

 It makes one think of a lot of butterflies nest- 

 ling among the green leaves. We have two 

 small ones on our grounds doing fairly well. 

 Begonias of all kinds were growing, some of 

 them into small trees, in the station green- 

 house ; but our begonias do not thrive for 

 some reason. We have tried them in the sun 

 and out of the sun. 



Our Ohio experiment farm is so large Prof. 

 Green's home was nearly a mile away. He 

 has charge of all the fruit. I found one of his 

 men bumping plum-trees, and I learned after- 

 ward that they we*e just about through, for 

 they have got the curculios morning after 

 morning so long that now not enough were 

 left worth going the rounds any more ; and 

 many of the trees were bearing magnificent 

 crops of plums, with scarcely a stung one in 

 the lot. Why, on some of the trees the plums 

 were piled toge her like bunches of grapes, 

 and the trees would break all to pieces if the 

 plums were not thinned out. Luscious cherries 

 were already ripe. One of them I liked so 

 well I am going to get some trees for my own 

 planting. It is called the Northwest It is of 

 very good size, beautiful shape, and fully 

 sweet enough to eat out of the hand, without 

 any sugar ; Vjesides, it is ripe just about with 

 the earliest strawberries. Prof. Green also rec- 

 ommended the Louis Phillip, just a little la- 

 ter. They have two new hardy plums which 

 he recommended — the " Reed " and the "Rich- 

 land." The Northwest cherry was purchased 

 of Stark Brothers, Missouri. 



Some of the peach-trees are going to bear 

 very fair crops. The peach yellows has never 

 yet made its appearance at the Wooster Sta- 

 tion, although it is almost all over the State. 



All the fruit is given clean level culture — just 

 bare ground between and around the trees. 



Prof. Green has a new way of training 

 grapes. He objected to the Fuller system 

 (and I do too), because one can not get 

 through the trellises. His new plan is to sup- 

 port the vines and wires so high up on posts 

 that one can walk under them, letting the 

 clusters of fruit hang just over your head. 

 The posts are iron pipe. This can often be 

 bought from piles of old iron. Across the 

 top, just so as to clear your head, is a cross- 

 piece, something like that on a telegraph-pole. 

 The pieces are 2 feet long. The central wire 

 runs under, and the two outer wires on top. 

 These outer wires are stapled clear out to the 

 outer upper corner. The vines are then train- 

 ed along the central wire, with the side shoots 

 carried off over the outside wires. With this 

 arrangement one can cultivate under the 

 grapevines both ways (with a small horse), 

 just as you would among the fruit-trees, and 

 nothing hinders you from going crosslots in 

 either direction through the vineyard. While 

 commercial grape-growers may not fancy this 

 arrangement, it strikes me as being just the 

 thing for home grounds. 



It would take a page or two to tell you 

 about the experiments in growing wheat. Our 

 first visit was to a plot where potatoes had 

 been grown the year before. This ground was 

 so rich that 't needed nothing more to make a 

 good crop of wheat ; therefore in some places 

 the wheat fell down worse where fertilizers 

 were applied than on the " nothing " plots; 

 but as a rule the chemicals gave a marked in- 

 crease. At other places on the farm they have 

 grown wheat year after year for a dozen years 

 or more on purpose to exhaust the soil so it 

 absolutely could not grow wheat any more 

 worth harvesting. On this ground the 

 "nothing" plots shoived nothing. There 

 were just a few straggling plants with poverty- 

 stricken heads of grain; but right beside these 

 plots, with a sharply defined line, was magnif- 

 icent wheat under the influence of only a very 

 small quantity of just the right kind of chem- 

 ical fertilizers. They are to have some photo- 

 graphs of these plots so as to make it plain 

 that on many of the exhausted farms of Ohio, 

 where wheat can not be grown so as to have a 

 crop worth harvesting, magnificent crops may 

 be secured by the application of the proper 

 chemicals. If I am correct, each farmer must 

 ascertain for himself what chemical is needed 

 to give the best results. Permit me to digress 

 a little right here. 



Yesterday, June 18, I visited the sub-station 

 at Strongsville, only a dozen miles due north 

 of my home. Our station selected this spot 

 because it was some of the poorest land in 

 Ohio. The ground was not fit for any thing 

 until it was underdrainedand manured. Well, 

 Mr. Mohn, the n;anager, showed me plots of 

 wheat last evening that were just beautiful, 

 with the "nothings" beside them literally 

 nothing. The only thing that made the crop 

 was 8 pounds of dissolved bontblack. lam 

 sorry I did not get the dimensions of the beds 

 used for tests; but I do not think they were 

 more than 20 feet wide by about 100 long. 



