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ODDS AND ENDS 



FROM EVERYWHERE 



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life 



Help Wanted for a Tropical Garden 



MY HOME is just ioo yards from the open 

 sea. In the rainy season, the salt mist burns 

 everything to the ground. Our summers are very 

 long, about eight months in the year, when we 

 have plenty of rain and very hot sunshine. The 

 soil is salt sea sand covered with about four inches 

 of light soil. What flowers, shrubs and fruit trees 

 can be planted ? Our plot is about ioo feet square, 

 and is located in Tela, Central America. 



Mrs. M. E. Connor. 



Boxwood Losing Leaves — Leaf Miner 



THOSE who have planted imported boxwood 

 plants (Buxus sempervirens) or whose boxwoods 

 are growing near those which have been imported 

 need not be surprised to find them sooner or later 

 more or less defoliated. Practically all the box- 

 wood sold by the florists or nurserymen in this 

 country are imported and with them have been 

 coming a minute insect — a leaf miner which lives 

 between the upper and lower skins of the leaf. It 

 has already been reported as becoming established 

 on Long Island and in California, and I have seen 

 specimens from other places. Plants which are 

 attacked will have leaves more or less discolored. 

 There will be brown patches of various sizes in the 

 leaves. Usually these dead areas are quite large 

 and result in the leaves ultimately drying out and 

 falling off. The worm winters over in the leaves 

 but it is not until they have emerged from the 

 leaves in the spring that the leaves dry up. New 

 growth starts and the little fly lays eggs on the new 

 leaves where the worms spend another winter. 



It has proved to be a very hard insect to fight. 

 So far spraying solutions have failed to have any 

 effect upon the larvas in the leaves because they 

 cannot be reached. Dr. E. P. Felt has tried some 

 experiments with fumigation and he has found that 

 a teaspoonful of carbon bisulphide to five quarts 

 of space exposed to the plants for the space of at least 

 an hour will kill the larva? without injuring the 

 plant. He has also found that potassium cyanide, 

 95 per cent, pure, used at the rate of one dram, with 

 a quarter of an ounce of sulphuric acid and three- 

 quarters of an ounce of water in 27 cubic feet of 

 space kill many of the larva when exposed to the 

 gas for fifteen minutes. This strength is about 

 half that usually recommended for fumigating 

 nursery plants. Further experiments may prove 

 that hydrocyanic acid gas can be used stronger than 

 that already reported without injury to the plants. 



Penna. P. T. Barnes. 



A Dewberry Discovery 



GROWN under the proper conditions, and 

 gathered at the psychological moment, the 

 dewberry deserves to rank with the aristocrats of 

 the small fruit kingdom for beauty and size and 

 flavor. Moreover, the vine and foliage are very 

 attractive; vines not so pretty as the dewberry are 

 used for decorative purposes. Yet the average 

 garden does not have dewberries. Most people 

 are content to buy wild dewberries, considering it 

 really more akin to wild life than to tame, and more 

 in place in an old pasture-field than in the home 

 garden. But they do not know the true tame dew- 

 berry, with its heavy vines and abundant foliage, 

 its big snowy blossoms, and its delicious fruit, 

 glossy and black and large. There is no more simi- 

 larity between the wild dewberry of the roadside 

 and the tamed variety than there is between the 

 worst wild strawberry and the best tame one. 



In growing the tame dewberry, I found that the 

 plants delighted in high-lying, sandy soil, or soil 

 that contained a good deal of loam. Much water, 

 too, was needed, especially through the critical 

 bearing season. One reason why the wild dewberry 

 is uniformly poor is because it grows as a rule on 

 high land, and is drought-stunted during the 



bearing season. To keep the soil about the plants 

 moist, and also to keep the berries clean, I mulched 

 the vines with straw. I tried tying the vines up to 

 stakes; but since the dewberry is essentially a runner 

 and not a climber, the vines did much better when 

 permitted to grow longitudinally instead of vertically. 

 By the method described, very fine berries were 

 secured; but one day I discovered a plan for mulch- 

 ing and supporting dewberries which has proven 

 itself of very attractive value. 



While walking along a road which had been 

 mended with crushed stone, I saw a dewberry vine 

 growing out of a small pile of the discarded rock, 

 and was struck by the size of the vine and the beauty 

 of the foliage. The vines near by were small and 

 insignificant. I determined to try the experiment 

 in the garden. 



Small loose stones were gathered and built in low 

 pyramids about the dewberry vines. They were 

 set firmly, but were not packed so close and tight 

 as to exclude the outspringing of new vines. Over 

 these stones the vines fell in a graceful green shower, 

 hiding just enough of their support to make the 

 effect attractive. Thus there was supplied to 

 the plants a permanent form of support, which 

 seemed to delight them because it was so close an 

 imitation of what they seem to like best in wild 

 situations. A mulch also was afforded; and when 

 water was necessary, it was poured on the stones, 

 and found its way gradually and effectively to the 

 dewberry roots. This mulch was very useful, too, 

 in conserving the natural moisture of the ground 

 and in preventing its evaporation. 



Penna. A. Rutledge. 



Stalk Borer in Japanese Iris 



A POND and bog-garden are full of alluring 

 possibilities — and I had dreamed of making 

 mine gorgeous with a girdle of stately Japanese 

 iris. I did my part by planting many roots of fine 

 varieties, and they did theirs by growing and making 

 many flower buds — but many of these withered 

 and failed to bloom. Last year, out of fifty buds, 

 I had but a half dozen flowers. 



At length I discovered the cause of failure to be 

 a wretched little worm, which hatched in the bud, 

 fed upon the tender petals, and, waxing fat and 

 large, bored his way down the stem, through sev- 

 eral of the nodes, feeding upon the pith. Having 

 reached maturity, he would open a little, round port- 

 hole, and make his escape to become a gray moth 

 leaving my iris brown and sere. 



This beast who eats the iris out 

 of house and home proved to be 

 the Papaipema nitella, commonly 

 known as the "Stalk borer," and, 

 besides the iris, attacks the lily, 

 dahlia, potato, tomato and corn. 

 Upon the latter the caterpillar in- 

 flicts considerable damage by bur- 

 rowing into the ear when the grain 

 is in the milk. 



It is a very difficult pest to erad- 

 icate, and here has done so much 

 damage to the iris, that several 

 garden-lovers have 

 practically aban- 

 doned the growing 1 

 of them. However, 

 I am able to offer 

 two methods of 

 control, which I have 

 tried with consider- 

 able success. 



The one depends 

 upon the c u r io u s 

 habit of the little 

 caterpillar, of thrust- The stalk 



ing his head out of com and tomato < 

 his little window. also plays havoc 

 Sometimes, with Japanese Iris 



45 



sharp eyes and quick fingers, I have been able to 

 catch him, and prevent him from destroying the 

 bud. The other method is based upon the fact 

 that the parent who stings the bud and deposits 

 the eggs therein is a night moth, who must alight 

 and hold fast to the bud while at work. So, to 

 make the bud an undesirable stamping ground, I 

 smear it slightly with gummy "tangle foot" which 

 remains soft, does not prevent the bud from flower- 

 ing, yet is as disagreeable to the feet of the mar- 

 auder as a soft tar pavement would be to ourselves. 



I find that none of the buds, so treated early in 

 the season have been stung, and all have bloomed. 

 The remedy is easy to apply, and needs no second 

 application. 



Washington, Conn. H. W. F. 



Some Rare Old Apples 



AS AN apple fancier who believes quite as much 

 in "the good old times" as in the commercial 

 apple-farmer's modern varieties, I make a practice 

 of keeping two or three trees open for the reception 

 of strange buds and grafts. My neighborhood is an 

 ordinary town built over what used to be cider 

 orchard ninety years ago. Old trees in their dotage 

 are in every block. And I have taken sprigs here 

 and there, and sent sample fruits to Harrisburg and 

 to Washington to be classified as fast as the lodgers 

 in my "Mills' Hotels for Apples" came to fruiting 

 age. 



One of the finest things I have discovered is an 1 

 almost extinct apple, very large, very crisp and juicy 

 and spicy, wilich the experts first called a Summer 

 Rambo a month late; but which was afterward 

 identified as a Mumper's Yandervere, or Winter 

 Smokehouse, enlarged beyond the type and a better 

 winter keeper. 



I have two distinct Rambos (winter), both 

 vouched for by old farmers and old-fashioned people 

 as the real thing; and they are notably different. 

 There are several flavors of Early Sour Harvest, 

 though the apples might all come from the same 

 tree as far as externals go. I have two kinds of 

 Sweet Bough, one paler and earlier by two weeks 

 than the other; the early one is perfect on the Fourth 

 of Juh r , which w r as the thing that greatly recom- 

 mended it to me on a huge old tree in Chester County 

 where I saw 7 it first and whence I obtained cions the 

 following spring. From New Hampshire, too, I 

 brought September twigs of a Golden Sweet fit to be 

 the food of seraphs, and domesticated some buds in a 

 young tree here. 



There is the Quaker apple — not the Quaker 

 usually so called. It is a striped red and yellow- 

 apple with as open an eye as the Seek-no-further, 

 and somewhat that aroma; but as spicy as the 

 Northern Spy and King in one, with crisp, yellowish 

 meat. Specimens of this I have not had an oppor- 

 tunity to send to experts as yet. It is as good an 

 apple as the York Imperial, and I suspect it of a for- 

 gotten kinship to the best of Spitzenbergs on Quaker 

 farms in the Delaware Valley. It is large to very 

 Iarge, and ripens so waxy as to leave a tallowy feel on 

 one's hands when one takes a few from the cellar 

 cupboard. It, like the Seek-no-further, the Black 

 Gilliflower, and the Tulpehocken, belongs most con- 

 vincingly to one's grandmother's childhood; the very 

 taste of them proves it. 



An apple which used to be abundant here, but 

 which I have not seen for twenty years, I should 

 think, was a summer pippin, yellow or whitish, never 

 pink-flushed, of round-conical shape and perfect 

 smoothness. It was tart enough to be a general 

 baking apple, mellow and rich, but not too tart to 

 eat. It was nearly as large as a Northern Spy, when 

 the tree stood in rich ground; and it was a prolific 

 annual bearer. It would not make cider, and I re- 

 member my grandmother's saying it was of no use 

 for drying, but I never heard a name for it. It 

 ripened a month or six weeks, coming into season in 

 August some time, and holding on as the standby of 



