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On making Garden Besoms. 



Art. V. On making Garden Besoms. By A. F. 



Seeing nothing, in any of 3'our numerous works on gardening and rural 

 economy, on the manufacture of an article the most essential to, and most 

 generally used in, every well-kept garden, I have taken some pains to point out 

 to yoUj and, through your Magazine, to my friends in the wide field of garden- 

 ing, the manly use of besoms, and a very superior mode of manufacturing 

 them. It is nothing of my own, nor is it, perhaps, new to some of your 

 readers ; but certainly it is not known or practised bj' one in a hundred that 

 have the greatest occasion to do so. 



I need not tell you, or any other gentleman or gardener at all acquainted 

 with rural affairs in this country, that besoms are made of birch, heather, or 

 any other tough spray that can be most readily come at ; but I must tell 

 you that, when the birch is got in lengths of 3 ft. from the top, it is to be 

 singled by tearing the strong forked branches asunder with the hands without 

 any tool, and when this is done the besom-builders begin, two to form the 

 faggot, and one to bind ; and, by the following contrivance, six score may be 

 bound in an hour by one man. 



A rope, of the strength and suppleness of window sash-cord, is to be at- 

 tached to a beam in the roof of a shed, as mfig. 32., 

 and it must be long enough to let one end reach the 

 floor ; this end is to be in a double of the cord for a 

 man to put his foot into, like a stirrup. The faggot 

 of birch, straight and the right size for the besom, is 

 handed to this man, who puts his cord once round the 

 birch, and, setting his foot in the stirrup, tightens the 

 faggot in the place where the first tie from the tip is to 

 be, and keeps it tight till he puts a tarred string twice 

 round and ties it ; then, shifting his cord to the place 

 where the other tie is wanted, tightens and ties that in 

 like manner ; with such a thorough command of, and 

 such an ability easily to compress, these otherwise 

 unyielding materials, as cannot fail to please tlie work- 

 men and profit the employer, who thus gets a day's 

 tying done in an hour ; and, instead of making this 

 trade an excuse for idhng away wet days, the gardener 

 may get a waggon-load of birch worked into besoms in 

 the course of a day, by half a dozen handy labourers. 



Now for the wielding of the instrument after it is made ; and we shall take, 

 as an example, the cleaning of a lawn after a morning's mowing. Every 

 alternate swarth is to be raked with a common hay-rake, or other blunt- 

 toothed rake, in such a way as to leave a breadth of two swarths for the 

 long-handled besom. Along the centre of this cleared space, a man starts 

 with a flattened besom on the end of a nine-foot handle, and sends all the grass 

 that he meets with right and left, leaving these two swarths cleanly swept. A 

 boy or a woman, with a short-handled besom, follows after, and sweeps ten 

 yards of this ridge upward, and ten yards downward, thus leaving the lawn 

 studded with heaps of grass 60 ft. apart one way, and 15 or 18 feet apart the 

 other way. This is again basketed into the grass-cart by a man and a boy 

 with a couple of boards and a besom. When this plan is followed all is regu- 

 larity ; the long-handled besom, doing the bulk of the brushing without ever 

 having to touch a blade of grass twice over, is a manly straight-forward sweeper; 

 for the person stands upright as a dart, and moves forward in a line, swinging 

 his arms on even balance, furrowing the greensward, whilst the women and 

 boys with their four-foot besoms lay it in heaps. 



The handles of the besoms should be shod with iron in the form of an arrow 

 head, and have a ferrule on the other end, to prevent the wood from giving 

 way in the act of putting the heads of birch on the besom's tail ; and, when 



rig.!52. Contrivance for 

 binding Birch Besoms, 



