80 ON GARDENING. 



Every farmer or gardener should make it his business every 

 year to plant and cultivate fruit trees. How many rich corners 

 and road-sides of his land, remain vacant, where if the seeds or 

 plants vvere once placed, the teeming earth, would soon load his 

 table with apples, pears, peaches, plumbs and grapes, each of 

 which serves not only as a dessert to garnish other food, but is 

 food itself. The sweet and pleasant varieties of these fruits 

 when well ripened afford a rich and wholesome aliment to the 

 human stomach, although much has been said during the last 

 year against their use, on account of cholera ; (and it is believed 

 that much more was said than was true,) yet nature has not 

 changed, and delicious fruits will be useful and used as long as 

 people live by eating and drinking. 



In none of these fruits are we more deficient than in the cul- 

 ture of grapes, and none are more easily raised, as will appear 

 by the following extract of a letter from my friend H. G. Spof- 

 ford, Esq. of Lansingburg, N. Y. In a letter of May, 1830, he 

 says " I have about one hundred bearing vines, none more than 

 four years old, they cover about one third of my garden of about 

 one third of an acre. They are principally on arbors and over 

 the walks around the buildings. I could have sold my fruit last 

 year for two hundred dollars. I ripen different varieties — and 

 had plenty to eat last year from the 10th of August to the mid- 

 dle of November, fresh plucked from the vines. I select from 

 the woods far and near the most vigorous growths of the indige- 

 nous grape, prune and train carefully, selecting from all, the best 

 varieties. I have some of a richness of taste, size and quality 

 not exceeded by any I ever saw." 



I visited this garden in June 1832, and witnessed the success 

 of his grape culture, and have now only to lament that death (by 

 cholera) has closed his useful experiments and to wish that 

 thousands may imitate his example. 



Apple trees which I set out in 1821, now yield me excel- 

 lent fruit, and are in good bearing order — and I have enjoyed 

 the fruit of two or three generations of peach trees since I oc- 

 cupied my present stand in 1817. I know a man in one of our 

 towns, who is getting double the value from the garden and 



