with the fingers or using a knife, talcing great care not to injure 

 the eyes. You should leave about three-quarters of an inch of the 

 old roots attached. Place the cuttings on top of the sand in flats 

 about one inch apart each way and give them a sprinkling of 

 water, then cover them with the sand to a depth that will enable 

 you to see the eyes peering over the surface and water them with 

 a sprinkler ; put them in good bottom heat with glass over them 

 and about the same shading that would be required for cuttings 

 of other kinds of foliage plants. 



I have had a propagating bed fixed on the west side of a 

 greenhouse in the following manner : I selected about. 50 feet of the 

 front bench with an extra heating pipe under it. Valves were put 

 on so that the heat could be regulated and shut off entirely if de- 

 sired. The bench was cased in with boards, scrubbed clean and 

 whitewashed. A board 15 inches high was fixed on the edge of 

 the bench at the back, a couple of inches from the wall, and an 

 8-inch board was nailed on the front edge of the bench, giving it 

 a 7-inch pitch, or much the shape of a cold frame. On the bottom 

 of the bench I placed pots, the 4-inch size at the back and thumb 

 pots in front at regular distances. On top of the pots the flats 

 containing the cuttings were placed, thus getting a pitch some- 

 what corresponding with the frame, the flats standing close to- 

 gether and leaving no room for mice to get at the cuttings from 

 the bottom. If the flats did not fit tight at the ends, clinkers 

 were filled in finer on top ; this made everything tight as far as 

 the bottom was concerned. A coat of lime about an inch thick 

 was put on top of the clinkers at the ends of the flats. If the 

 flats are enclosed with a line of lime there will be no loss on ac- 

 count of snails, which in the places of some growers have dam- 

 aged or entirely ruined thousands of cuttings in a single night. 

 Mice will do considerable damage if they get a chance at the 

 flats where the young eyes begin to sprout. I have had thousands 

 of cuttings ruined by mice, although I depended upon a cat that 

 I kept in the greenhouse. Poison should be put on the edges of 

 the flats. After the flats were fixed in the bench in the manner 



