302 OBSERVATIONS ON VEGETABLES. 



CUCUMBERS SET BY BEES. 



If bees, who are much the best setters of cucumbers, do not happen 

 to take kindly to the frames, the best way is to tempt them by a little 

 honey put on the male and female bloom. When they are once 

 induced to haunt the frames, they set all the fruit, and will hover with 

 impatience round the lights in a morning, till the glasses are opened. 

 Probatum est. WHITE. 



WHEAT. 



A notion has always obtained that in England hot summers are 

 productive of fine crops of wheat ; yet in the years 1780 and 1781, 

 though the heat was intense, the wheat was much mildewed, and the 

 crop light. Does not severe heat, while the straw is milky, occasion its 

 juices to exude, which being extravasated, occasion spots, discolour the 

 stems and blades, and injure the health of the plants 1 WHITE. 



TRUFFLES. 



August. A truffle-hunter called on us, having in his pocket several 

 large truffles found in this neighbourhood. He says these roots are not 

 to be found in deep woods, but in narrow hedge-rows and the skirts of 

 coppices. Some truffles, he informed us, lie two feet within the earth, 

 and some, quite on the surface ; the latter, he added, have little or no 

 smell, and are not so easily discovered by the dogs as those that lie 

 deeper. Half-a-crown a pound was the price which he asked for this 

 commodity. Truffles never abound in wet winters and springs. They 

 are in season, in different situations, at least nine months in the year. 

 WHITE. 



TREMELLA FOSTOC. 



Though the weather may have been ever so dry and burning, yet 

 after two or three wet days, this jelly-like substance abounds on the 

 walks. WHITE. 



FAIRY RINGS.* 



The cause, occasion, call it what you will, of fairy rings, subsists in 

 the turf, and is conveyable with it : for the turf of my garden- walks, 

 brought from the down above, abounds with those appearances, which 

 vary their shape, and shift situation continually, discovering themselves 

 now in circles, now in segments, and sometimes in irregular patches 

 and spots. Wherever they obtain, puff-balls abound; the seeds of 

 which were doubtless brought in the turf. WHITE. 



* Several causes have been assigned for the presence of fairy rings, as they are 

 termed, an appearance occurring in pasture lands of a dark ring, as if the grass 

 was of more luxuriant and of a darker green. We have sometimes observed the 

 ring incomplete. Wherever we have noticed these, fungi have been present, 

 which afterwards would spring up in the line of the circle, and to their presence 

 we believe the appeai'ance is now generally attributed. The regularity of the 

 dark mark calls attention, but the tracks of the fungi, or the lines iu which they 

 will spring, may frequently be observed to run quite irregularly, showing also a 

 dark green mark. 



