154 GARDENING FOB THE SOUTH. 



good many more degrees of cold than others. "When a 

 severe frost is pretty certain, billets of short, dry wood, fat 

 light wood, and piles of wet tan, saw-dust, or other damp 

 trash, should be distributed about 2 rods apart over the fruit 

 garden, and the most to the windward. The tan or trash 

 should be distributed during the winter. About three 

 o'clock in the morning is soon enough to start the fires, 

 each of which is made with three or four of the billets, 

 being kindled with the light wood. When well lighted, 

 put on and nearly smother it with the wet tan. If it 

 again break out into a blaze, apply more tan, and keep up 

 damp, smouldering fires, and a curtain of smoke over the 

 trees until the sun is well up and the frost fully extracted. 

 If the fruit is frozen hard as bullets, have no fears, but 

 keep up a dense smoke. By this mode of applying smoke 

 the peach crop can be saved every year. There is no 

 doubt about it. When a boy, thirty-five years ago, we ate 

 of pears thus saved by an uncle of ours, and have our- 

 selves since repeatedly practiced it and seen it tried by 

 others. Our Gardening was the first English work, so far 

 as we know, in which this mode of protection was publish- 

 ed, though French authors, we find, allude to the process. 

 Boussingault says it is as old as the Incas of Peru. The 

 peach crop has thus been preserved with the mercury as 

 low as 24 on the morning of March 27th, arid the blos- 

 soms mostly fallen. Without such protection few good 

 varieties of the peach are safe with the mercury below 

 30. The expense of the operation is but a trifle, com- 

 pared with the value of a fine crop of fruit in a locality 

 where all, not thus protected, is cut off. 



Winter protection is also necessary for the preservation 

 of many valuable plants, the limits within which they are 

 naturally found being much narrower than those within 

 which they can be grown in perfection with a little, pro- 

 tection. Besides ordinary bedding plants which are stored 

 during the winter in pits or other structures, and again 



