Advantageous Planting. 477 



Art. IX. On the advantageous Planting of a Piece of Ground, 

 xvith Hemarlis on Pruning, 8^c. By Agronome. 



Sir, 



I AM sorry to inform you, that the plan which I proposed 

 for myself, and other contributors to your Magazine, will not 

 answer, viz. to write in haste, and correct at leisure. I wrote 

 my first, as I proposed ; but, instead of correcting it, something 

 else came into my head, which I thought well to commit to 

 paper before it went out of my head ; and, before I had finished 

 that, something else intruded ; and so on, till I had finished all 

 my paper, and yet not one sheet is fit to send you, much less to 

 send into the wide world. Indeed, I did not think you would 

 have published my last; to tell you the truth, I am rather 

 ashamed of it : but I must endeavour in this to make amends, 

 and say something that will be really useful to the public ; and 

 the following I shall call, in imitation of a certain great man, 

 The Profitable Planter. 



In the winter of 181i-15, on account of some alterations of 

 roads, plantations, &c., a piece of land dropped into my hands, 

 of an awkward shape for tillage, and rather too small for pas- 

 ture; I therefore concluded to introduce a little spade-hus- 

 bandry ; as the piece was pretty near to the farm-yard, the 

 intercourse or advantages betwixt them would be reciprocal. 

 Accordingly, having no gardeners, I set farm-labourers to 

 make so many ditches, four feet wide and two feet deep, at 

 every twelve yards, clear across the whole; the turf and 

 good soil were thrown on one side, and the bad soil on the 

 other. The labourers wondered what such ditches could 

 mean, as they were as wide at bottom as at top, and par- 

 ticularly when I ordered them to be filled up, a foot thick, with 

 fresh farm-yard dung; and the turf, and what little good soil 

 there was, chopped, and thrown on the top of the dung. I had 

 prepared a compost of turf and dung the year before, which 

 was laid upon the whole, about nine inches thick, in which I 

 planted fruit trees in the following order : — At every six feet, 

 in the centre of what I now called a border, was planted a 

 standard, then a gooseberry, then a currant, then a dwarf, 

 then a currant, then a gooseberry, then a standard, &c. I 

 was not so particular as some are in my choice of fruit trees ; 

 I gave my nurseryman a kind of roving commission, to send 

 me a couple of each of such as he could recommend, and then 

 added two, four, six, or eight of such as I could recommend 

 myself. On the edges of the borders I planted rows of straw- 

 berry plants, six inches apart, which I have only renewed 

 about twice in ten years ; the fruit is always excellent, and 



