Culture of Onions. 75 



be retained, and the other displaced ; and, soon after the 

 fruit is gathered, the shoot that bore fruit must be cut back 

 to the young one before mentioned, at the base. By these 

 means you will keep the tree continually supplied with young 

 bearing wood, and consequently free from the confusion of 

 weak naked shoots that in general fill the morello, by per- 

 mitting the terminal bud to proceed, and go one beyond 

 another, as in the old method, producing a tree something 

 \\\ie Jig. 18., which is nothing but a mass of confusion, and 

 unable to produce a crop of fine fruit, from the enormous 

 load of useless wood that it has to support. 



I am, Sir, yours, &c. 



William Seymour. 

 Palace Gardens, Bishoptlwrpe, Oct. 23. 1831. 



Art. XXIII. On the Culture of Onions. By Mr. John Mit- 

 chell, Jun., Gardener, Slapton, near Dartmouth, Devon. 



Sir, 



The crop of onions, this year, has been universally pro- 

 ductive in the neighbourhood of Slapton. Encouraged by 

 your insertion of a letter from me, on a former occasion, 

 (Vol. VIII. p. 469.), I trouble you with this, for the purpose of 

 communicating to you the result of an experiment which I 

 made this season in sowing a bed of onions in the garden of 

 J. Deere, Esq., of this parish. 



The soil of the garden is a decomposed argillaceous slate, 

 reduced to a fine mould, to the depth of one foot ; beneath 

 the mould it is rubble, or the slate broken into small 

 fragments mixed up with earth, for the depth of more than 

 another foot ; it having been broken up with pickaxes for the 

 purpose of deepening the soil, about three years since. 

 V^here I sowed my onion crop, the soil had been dressed 

 like the rest of the garden, and not treated better. The bed 

 was 14 ft. long and 8 ft. wide. On the 28th day of February 

 I sowed my seed, vihich was of the Deptford sort. My 

 employer, Mr. Deere, has all his crops sown in drills; a 

 mode very rarely practised in this part of the country, where 

 prejudice and ignorance prevail, to the exclusion of all im- 

 provement. I made my drills at 18 in. apart, and raised 

 between them crops of radishes and Patagonian lettuce. 

 During the spring and summer we were much occupied in 

 the formation of a new kitchen-garden, and other work, to 

 the neglect of my onion crop. The radishes were drawn as 

 they became fit for use ; but the lettuces were permitted to 



