FRUITS. CHAP. 



stocks for medlars are pears or hawthorn. In many of 

 the cases, stocks may be raised from suckers, and they 

 are so raised $ but never ought to be so raised. Suckers 

 are shoots that come up out of the ground, starting from 

 the roots of trees, and are very abundant from pears and 

 plums, and sometimes from cherries. They run to wood, 

 and produce suckers themselves in abundance, which 

 trees do not that are raised from seeds, cuttings, or 

 layers. Suckers, therefore, never ought to be used to 

 graft or bud upon ; for, if you graft a pear, for instance, 

 upon a pear sucker, the tree begins to send out suckers 

 almost immediately ; and, in America, where this hasty 

 and lazy practice prevails, I have seen a pear orchard 

 with all the ground covered with underwood forming a 

 sort of coppice. I will, therefore, say no more about 

 suckers, but proceed now to the proper mode of obtain- 

 ing stocks, first speaking of those which are to be ob- 

 tained from the pips-, and then of those which are to be 

 obtained from the stones. The pips of crabs, apples, 

 pears and quinces, are obtained from the fruit : the three 

 former in great abundance when cider, perry, or verjuice 

 are made ; the last with some difficulty, on account of 

 the comparative rareness of the fruit, but quince stocks 

 are so easily obtained from cuttings or layers that this is 

 not a matter of much consequence. The pips are, of 

 course, collected in the fall of the year j and when col- 

 lected, make them dry, put them immediately into fine 

 dry earth or sand, and keep them safe from mice until 

 the month of March. When that month comes, dig a 

 piece of ground well and truly, make it rich ; make it 

 very fine, form it into beds three feet wide, draw drills 

 across it at eight inches distance, make them from two 



