32 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



cutworms is by the use of a poisoned bait. The soil should be 

 plowed early and kept cultivated until the crop is planted so as to 

 deprive the cutworms of food. Then apply the poisoned bait late 

 in the afternoon, a day or two before the crop is planted. Clover 

 or other succulent herbage dipped in Paris green, one-half pound 

 per barrel of water, may be scattered along the rows in bunches, 

 and kept from withering if covered by a board or litter. The 

 thorough spraying of weeds and grass which may have grown upofl 

 a garden plot with Paris green will also be found of value. Poisoned 

 bran mash makes an excellent bait, which may also be used against 

 grasshoppers, but not where poultry run at large. Mix one pound 

 of Paris green or white arsenic with twenty-five pounds of bran or 

 middlings, and then moisten with water containing a little cheap 

 molasses, so as to form a damp mash, but not so wet as to cake. A 

 tablespoonful should be placed near each plant or every three or 

 four feet in the row, putting it out late in the afternoon. This 

 method has been successfully used on a large scale by tobacco 

 growers. The dead worms will not be found on the surface of the 

 soil, but a little search beneath the soil will reveal them and their 

 depredations will decrease at once. Market gardeners frequently 

 protect their plants by knocking the bottoms out of old tin cans and 

 placing a tin cylinder around each plant. A similar cylinder may 

 be made from heavy tarred paper. Such cylinders should be sunk 

 in the soil for an inch or two, and will thus prevent access by the 

 worms. 



As soon as potatoes are up and tomatoes are set out they are at 

 once infested with m}Tiads of small black flea beetles, which eat 

 small pits out of the foliage, often penetrating the leaf so that it 

 looks at if hit by a charge of very fine shot. So severe is this attack 

 that tomatoes are often destroyed or seriously checked. These 

 little beetles have been well named, for like their namesake the flea 

 they perform prodigies in jumping which would put to shame any 

 Olympian winner of the broad jump, for one of these little beetles 

 will jump several feet, several hundred times its own length, to 

 equal which a man would need to jump a half or three-quarters of a 

 mile. Many species of these flea beetles attack our garden crops, 

 but the most common is the so-called potato flea beetle. The flea 

 beetles have an interesting life-historv in that the larval stage is 



