1863. 



NEW ENGLAND FARMER. 



145 



out a head supply the place of a broken pane ; 

 flour and corn were cheap last year — pork, and 

 beef cheap too — his manure heap at the end of the 

 barn lies in the road through the year ; but the day 

 of reckoning may come to this slothful man sooner 

 than may meet his convenience. 



These are war times — a southern, civil war, that 

 has taken the Government by the throat, and 

 threatens tlje northern people with the virus fangs 

 of the copperhead. Our farms and workshops must 

 be worked. Let seed-time find no laggards in the 

 field. Let the warm upland hejlni manured and 

 put into wheat, all you can spare ; let the other 

 small grains follow, and when you get to the mouth 

 of August, let the winter wheat be sown liberally, 

 and, from spring and winter, you will have wheat 

 to sell ! 



Mr. Editor, I feel that I am intruding upon your 

 diminished columns, (yet it was a war necessity,) 

 with all their former good, in a compressed form ; 

 I feel tliat an idle hour may not have been misspent 

 with your farm-readers. 



The great majority of our soldiers are farmers ; 

 the immense products of their labor will be sensi- 

 bly felt and diminshed ; neither war, nor the world, 

 can go on without them. Hence, every appliance 

 in its most compact, concentrated form, j)romises 

 a good result by the abundance of manure on hand, 

 which, if well spread and ploughed in deep, sel- 

 dom injures the soil or dwarfs the crop. P. 



Brooklyn, L. I., March, 1863. 



For the Xetp England Farmer. 

 TREES FOB SHADE, ORNAMENT AND 

 PROFIT. 



Mr. Editor : — My thoughts have been turned 

 to this sublet by an article which appeared in the 

 Farmer ni-.r long since, on tlie "Cultivation of, 

 Nuts," by 0. V. Hills, of this town. It seems to ' 

 me some of his suggestions are well worthy the 

 consideration of farmers, especially those which ' 

 relate to cultivating walnut and chestnut trees, i 

 which are natural or indigenous to many parts of j 

 New England, and are not only profitable for the i 

 nuts they produce, but their form or shape is gen- 

 erally such as to make them suitable for shade and 

 ornament, and when they have ceased to answer j 

 these purposes, they are still valuable for the tini- 1 

 ber and fuel which they afford. If a portion of I 

 the trees on Boston Common produced nuts, the I 

 "city squirrels" there, and at least some of the 

 children of the poor, might enjoy them without 

 expense, and young men from the country would ' 

 be reminded of the pleasant days, when with tlie ' 

 girls they went nutting, I 



The meat of the butternut it seems to me is too 

 oily to be healthy ; it requires pretty hard blows , 

 to break the shell, and there is always more or less 

 danger of cracking the fingers instead of the nuts. 

 The tree is not very valuable even for fuel, and ^ 

 would hardly be considered ornamental. 1 



The c!ni is a graceful, noble tree, but it bears j 

 nothing while growing, nor will anything else, (ex- 

 cept perhaps grass,) grow within the range of its 

 roots, and when the time comes to cut it down, 

 'tis no light labor to prepare the trunk for the saw- 

 mill, and the branches for the stove. It was some- 

 what diilerent in the days of old-fashioned fire- 

 places which swallowed limbs and even logs, from 

 six to eight feet long, and soon digested them. 



The buttonwood or sycamore is not as graceful 



as the elm, nor so good for timber, and Sambo 

 might well say, when attempting to split a sjieci- 

 men, the gram of which was uncommonly wind- 

 ing, that he thought it would be a pretty tough 

 match for the lighting. 



The oak has justly been styled the king of the 

 forest, but does not lyipear to be so highly prized 

 for shade and ornament as his prime minister, the 

 rock maple, whose well-proportioned stately form, 



"Arraycfi in summer robe? of richest Rreen, 



Or autumn decked, when rainbow lints arc seen," 



is peculiarly adapted to these purposes. Nor is 

 this all, for after attaining sufficient size, it yields 

 an annual supply of sap, which can be converted 

 into the sweetest of sugars, and also furnishes 

 some of the best material for furniture and the 

 fire. 



Not much can be said in favor of the various 

 poplars, especially the old Lombardy, now near- 

 ly extinct in this part of the country, but which 

 in their day and generation looked like long lines 

 of tall grenadiers, and were about as well calculat- 

 ed for shade and ornament as so many liberty 

 poles. 



I will not take the time and space to speak of 

 the spruce and some other trees which might be 

 mentioned, as I wish to make a few inqun-ies. 



Mr. Hills, in his communication, says that 

 chestnuts vary in size, some being very large and 

 others quite small. The same may be said respect- 

 ing walnuts, and wlrile some ripen early and fall 

 readily, (frost or no frost,) others do not mature 

 until some weeks later, and even then cling to 

 the tree tenaciously. There is also a difference in 

 the color and taste or flavor of the meat and the 

 ease with wliich it can be removed from the shell 

 when cracked. In fact, some are worth twice as 

 much as others, at least to keep, if not for the 

 market. 



Now I wish to inquire if nuts can be grafted, 

 or budded, and thus improved and made more 

 profitable by raising only the best, as in Lhe case 

 of fruits ? Can they be propagated in any man- 

 ner except by planting the seed? Would the 

 quality be improved, as well as the quantity in- 

 creased, by manure and cultivation ? I liave about 

 a hundred walnut trees, varying in size from an 

 inch in diameter to more than a foot, and from five 

 years old to at least an hundred. Between forty 

 and fifty are within a few feet of the wall ii])on the 

 north side of my farm, but some of the otliers 

 have sprung up, as it were spontaneously, in 

 places where I do not wish to have tlu-m remain ; 

 but it is very difficult to remove this kind of tree 

 successfully, even when rather small, on account 

 of the dejith to wiiich the main or tap root de- 

 scends. What would be the eflect to remove the 

 earth fi-om one side, down some distance, sever 

 the tap root, replace the soil and allow the tree to 

 remain a year or two, and then remove it ; would 

 it not be more likely to live, than if transplanted 

 immediately ? Has any one made the experiment ? 

 An answer to any of the above questions will much 

 oblige your correspondent. a. c. w. 



Leominster, March, 18G.i. 



^^ Late advices from Alexandria state that the 

 crop of cotton in Eijypt promit'es to be most iilmn- 

 dant this year. There will be not less than IsO.OOO 

 bales for export, the quantity last year having been 

 only 100,000. 



