THE LARCH. 215 
The beds should be carefully weeded throughout the season. 
The young plants will have completed their first year’s growth 
by the end of September, when a good crop should cover the 
ground, and stand from four to seven inches high. A full crop 
is too close for remaining another year. Itis therefore a com- 
mon practice to loosen the plants with a fork, and to thin 
them out to the extent of one-half during the ensuing winter 
or spring. Those that are picked out should be trans- 
planted into lines about one foot apart, the plants standing a 
few inches asunder. Here they remain one year, when they, 
as well as the plants left in the seed-beds, which have become 
two years old, are fit for being planted into bare moorland. 
Larches should never remain beyond two years in the seed- 
bed. When stout plants are required, such as those best 
adapted to overcome and extirpate a cover of furze, or other 
rank herbage, the plants should be allowed to remain two 
years in the nursery lines. A common practice is to remove 
every other line in the lot of one-year transplanted plants 
which affords the lines of two-year transplanted plants 
during the last year of their nursery growth a space of two 
feet asunder. They should never be allowed to remain more 
grass for the sake of its seed crops. On one occasion, a crop of seedling larch 
was made to follow the Italian rye-grass ; the soil was of a fine friable mould, 
with a considerable mixture of sand and peat, well adapted for forming 
fibrous roots, at the same time well fitted for the development of the larve 
of the Tipula or crane-fly. I do not recollect in what month the grass plot 
was broken up, but the surface sward was regularly placed under a stamp of : 
clean earth, and the ground well pulverized. The larch crop was laid down 
about the Jast week of April, in beds four feet wide, with alleys one foot ; 
about the last week of May the crop had appeared above ground quite regular, 
and had a very promising appearance ; and it was, I think, in the first week of 
June, after an absence of a few days from home, that late one, evening, after 
a heavy shower, I was surprised on looking at the crop to find that the plants 
had disappeared entirely in five or six beds near one side of the lot. A 
similar space adjoining contained an irregular half crop ; onwards the beds 
stood much more complete, but at least 600,000 to 700,000 plants had dis- 
appeared, On disturbing the surface and examining the ground, the enemy 
was discovered to be the grub-worm in considerable numbers. As it was on 
a Saturday night, the men, women, and boys who were in the habit of work- 
ing on the grounds were immediately collected, and provided with dibbles ; 
they went over nearly half an acre of ground ihat evening, forming a division 
between the full crop and the blank land; this space they completely perforated 
with holes—throughout the bedsand alleys in every blank space, whereno plants 
