128 



GEA^s^BERKY CULTURE. 



the Tines on the blackened surface^ indicated 8° higher 

 than on the whitened one. I have found that fruit, 

 picked from yines that do not hide the ground^ is 

 unsound. It has been so for many years in my experience. 



A few years since, about the first week in September, 

 I yisited, before daylight in the morning, a natural bog, 

 with a heayy crop of fruit, and found the yines and fruit 

 eyerywhere coyered with frost ; but an hour or two 

 after sunrise, on some parts of the bog, the fruit was 

 softened, and on others not. Where the soil was sandy, 

 and the yines comparatiyely short, with the fruit exposed 

 to yiew, and the weather, there were no softened berries. 

 But when hidden from yiew by grass, on raud bottom, 

 and where there was a mulch of old grass, and there were 

 yines between the soil and fruit, the berries were softened. 

 The same thing was noticed on several other occasions ; 

 I can only explain it by supposing that sand, with less 

 mulch upon it, was a better conductor of caloric than 

 the mud, with its heayy mulch. The fruit oyer the sand 

 began to thaw first, from the warmth of the earth, and 

 increased warmth of the day. The thawing was done 

 slowly, and the berries were not softened, but no thawing 

 was done on the muddy and heayily mulched ground 

 until the direct rays of the sun shone upon the berries, 

 and thawed them rapidly enough to break up their struc- 

 ture. By sanding yines subject to softening by frost, the 

 trouble has been in a great measure preyented. 



I haye seen fruit with the defectiye spots dried up, and 

 appear not to spread ; not unlike the dry, rotten spots in 

 apples ; and I feel that the rapid spread of the scald is 

 caused by the moist, rainy weather, acting on berries 

 rendered defectiye by the previous drouth. This would 

 explain all 'the loss that occurred after the rains began^ 

 except on those bogs that were coyered by water. 



^'In June last, I set two women at work picking 

 three rov\^s of gooseberries in my garden. These rows 



