On the Love Apple. 



by which I fasten them to the banks, into which they fre- 

 quently strike root, and so support themselves. I top them as 

 soon as their branches meet, and through the whole summer 

 take particular care to clear off all the lateral shoots, and 

 to thin the leaves, by which the fruit is exposed, and conse- 

 quently well ripened. In private gardens it is the practice 

 to put out the plants against a wall, training them to it, but I 

 consider a bank to be much the most congenial station for 

 the Tomato." 



" My crop in the last season amounted to six hundred 

 plants, and I suppose I gathered from them four hundred 

 half sieves of fruit for the market, each half sieve weighing 

 about twenty pounds.* From the extraordinary fine season, 

 the growth of this fruit round London exceeded the demand, 

 and I had therefore a great quantity undisposed of ; taking 

 this and the unripe fruit into account, I am satisfied that 

 on an average each plant produced twenty pounds weight. 

 The crop on several single plants probably weighed forty 

 pounds. Individual fruits were this year of extraordinary 

 size, many of them exceeding twelve inches in circumference, 

 and weighing twelve ounces each." 



The ancient and modern writers on plants and gardening 

 all mention varieties of the Tomato, more or less in number, 

 differing both in the colour and shape of the fruit. Several 

 of these were grown last summer in the garden of the Horti- 

 cultural Society, from seeds imported from France. The 

 plants were raised in the same manner as the common sort, 

 and were trained to a wall with a western aspect, against 

 which they grew to the heighth of nine feet, and were 

 * A half sieve is the third part of a bushel. 



