THE ACCIDENTS OF CULTIVATION. 



41 



13. — Rotation of Crops. 

 Such an arrangement as the change of crops becomes 

 necessary because different plants exhaust the soil of 

 particular elements, and are more or less gross and ex- 

 travagant in their habits ; so that where they have 

 grown one year they will have so much withdrawn the 

 kind of food they require, as to be incapable of attaining 

 any perfection on the same plot in the following season. 

 Other kinds, however, coming after them, may not need 

 anything like so much of the same element, or may not 

 even want it at all. The practice likewise causes a saving 

 of manure, for when the food a crop requires has not 

 been abstracted from the soil by a previous crop, manure 

 will sometimes be superfluous. Potatoes, scarlet-runners, 

 broccoli, and the cabbage tribe, particularly demand a 

 fresh soil yearly. Pansies, hyacinths, and other bulbs 

 and florists' flowers that are of hybrid origin, are simi- 

 larly fastidious, if they are to be grown to great per- 

 fection. 



By ridging up the ground in winter for vegetable 

 crops, and thus admitting new gases from the air, and 

 salts from snow and rain, the rotation plan of cropping 

 becomes less necessary, though it may never be entirely 

 dispensed with. Perhaps, when the precise food which 

 every individual crop requires, and the manures fully 

 capable of supplying such are more thoroughly known, 

 and experimentally tested, the necessity for changing 

 yearly the vegetable tenants of any particular piece of 

 land that best suits a certain tribe, may be almost if 

 not altogether annihilated. 



IV.— THE ACCIDENTS OF CULTIVATION. 



In giving practical effect to the principles of gardening, 

 there will be a number of things requisite to be obtained, 

 and a multitude of little cross agencies to avoid or to 

 remove. These are here, for convenience, termed the 



accidents " of cultivation ; some of them being mere 

 adjuncts to the art, and others of only casual occurrence. 

 We shall only advert to two or three of the principal of 

 them. 



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