36 BrXLETIX 1082, U. S. DEPAETMEXT OF AGRICULTL'EE. 



California northward. Successes have been had in Michigan. Good 

 bulbs have been grown on a small scale in Virginia, Xew York, Ver- 

 mont, and Ohio. One success is recorded in southwestern Missouri, 

 although confessedly under difficulty and only with Darwins and 

 late tulips. Many more illustrations might be cited, but the above 

 are sufficient to prove the contention that the crop is quite adaptable. 

 The main requisites are, first of all, a soil that does not bake, 

 plenty of moisture, good drainage, and a not too rapid transition 

 from winter to summer. 



ENEMIES OF TULIPS. 



If the tulip grower observes the rules of ordinary sanitation and 

 good culture and rotates his crops so as not to get back on the same 

 ground with tulips oftener than once in three years he seldom need 

 worry about diseases. The tulip is remarkably free from pests. 

 The popular notion that mysterious scourges come along and wipe 

 out the crop is fallacious. Even a bulb so badly injured that it can 

 not make root is often not lost. There is frequently a good, uninjured 

 bud which will commonly round off into a perfectly healthy but 

 small bulb which can be grown so as to give a normal progeny again. 

 Often bulbs have been seen so injured by molds or poor drainage in 

 winter and early spring that they died down four weeks before their 

 time but left a perfectly healthy bulblet, although only a tenth of the 

 size of the original. 



The most serious enemy of the tulip bulb is the bulb house. Here 

 all sorts of abuses are practiced which may lead to disaster, but the 

 rots and the molds of the bulb house are no more diseases of the tuhp 

 than the same rots and molds are diseases of bread and pastry in the 

 kitchen pantry. Of course, if the moisture conditions are not under 

 proper control, bulbs in piles will rot, but so will wheat and com, and 

 it may be said that a properly cured tuhp bulb with its coat on is 

 about as effectively protected from fungi, either saprophytic or 

 parasitic, as a grain berry. If the coats are abraded and the bulbs 

 bruised, of course, the ordinary black and blue molds will find 

 ingress and do great injury, but this is also true of potatoes. 



Second to the ''bulb-house pest" should be mentioned the fire dis- 

 ease, caused by the mold Botrytis. (PL VII, Fig. 2.) This is really 

 the only disease of consequence which has affected tulips in this 

 country. This saprophytic mold under certain favorable conditions 

 is capable of becoming a real parasite, attacking and destroying living 

 tissues. 



When this disease appears in the bulb fields, little can be done to 

 check its progress. It is said that the Hollander drives stakes aroimd 

 a focus of infestation and stretches muslin to prevent the spores being 

 spread by the wind to healthy foliage, but it has never been thought 

 that such a remedy was practicable in any attack observed by the 



