1871 



THE WESTERN POMOLOGIST 



mt gimgartr. 



vineyard Work for June. 



Bt the Associate EniTon. 



By this time the weather will have become quite 

 warm ami the vines will be growing rapidly. The}' 

 must now be closely watched and attended to in 

 season, or the whole vineyard will twine in a mass 

 of confusion. 



Tie up loosely new shoots from the proper spurs 

 or points from whence they should start, horizon- 

 tally to fill the place of the bearing canes, unless 

 you train on the spur system, then it will not be 

 necessarj'. If the renewing shoots grow too fast 

 and are long jointed, pinch them back to the low- 

 er wire, and train up lateral shoots in their stead, 

 which will be shorter jointed, firmer in wood, and 

 much better for fruiting. Keep ofl" all the succors 

 from your vines, and when they are done blooming 

 pinch back all the laterals from the axils of the 

 bearing shoots to o?ie leaf, and when they start 

 again from the axils of the last pinched shoots, and 

 have made two leaves, pinch back again to one leaf 

 as before, after this let them grow, unless an occa- 

 sional one which may become too rampant, pinch 

 it off. 



If your vines have been properly pruned and 

 trained there will be a surplus of fruit set, if so, 

 pinch off immediately all imperfect bunches and 

 reduce the quantity of fruit to the capacity of the 

 strength of your vines. 



This an experienced vineyardest can generally 

 determine by the vigor of the vine. If too much fruit 

 is left on the vines it will exhaust them and require 

 years to recover, and if too little is left on, they 

 will grow too much wood, and be more subject to 

 the rot and the wood will make too long growth, 

 and be immature. 



Tie up your grafts as they grow, and keep off all 

 suckers from the stalks. 



Fill up your layers and keep tlie ground clean. 

 Cultivate j-our vineyard and cuttings well and keep 

 them free from weeds. Do all your work in .=ieason 

 and do it well, which is always the cheapest and 

 best. 



For tying up the growing shoots we use gunny 

 sacks, which are cheap and good, but some prefer 

 rye straw, yucca, paw-paw bark or corn husks, but 

 we cannot see that any of them are preferable to 

 the twine of the gunny sacks in any respect. 



Hybridization of the grape should lie performed 

 before the grapes are in bloom. The petals or caps 

 should be removed just before they are ready to 

 burst open. It is too late to wait until they become 

 partly detacheil below, as the grape is then already 

 impregnated. Half of the matter written on the 

 suject is speculative— the grape being almost an ex- 

 ception to the general rule. The subject is too deli- 

 cate and intricate to describe in this place. 

 « » « ~ 



Gkapes dnder Colored Glass. The Eorticvl- 

 lurist says: 



" One of the most successful cold graperies near 

 Philadelphia has every third section of lights made 

 entirely of blue glass. It is an important fact that 

 colored glass does affect very materially the growth 

 of vegetation beneath it. More than ten years ago, 

 Mr. R. Hunt, Secretary of the Royal Polytechnic 

 Society, of England, said that the light which per- 

 meates colored glass partakes, to some considerable 

 extent, of the character of the ray which corres- 

 ponds with the glass in color ; thus, blue glass ad- 

 mits the chemical ray.s, to the exclusion, or nearly 

 so, of all others; yellow glass admits only the for- 

 mation of luminous ray.s, while red glass cuts oft' all 

 but the heating rays. Yellow and red rays are de- 

 structive to vegetation ; violet, indigo, or blue, are 

 favorable to it." 



The Grape Vine.— In his treatise on the grape 

 vine, Mr. Mohr, a German author, says that the 

 main parts of a good grape vine in the summer, are 

 the stem, cane, shoot, or branch. The branch lasts 

 about six months, from May to October, when it 

 turns brown and becomes a cane. The cane lasts 

 for twelve months, from October to October, when 

 it changes to a stem. The stem lasts as long as tlie 

 vine— from twenty-five to hundreds of years. The 

 shoots of canes will bear fruit the coming year. 

 The shoots from the stem require one season's 

 growth to form buds to bear fruit the year after. 



