FROM SEED TO GROVE. 23 



deep, two feet wide, and as long as your boards will allow, twelve, 

 sixteen or twenty feet, a bottom is unnecessary ; nail on braces to 

 keep the boards from spreading, fill the box with sand mixed 

 with well rotted stable manure, or with a small portion of com- 

 mercial fertilizer mixed through it ; pack it down firmly. Pour 

 on water until the ground is thoroughly saturated, then with a 

 pointed stick make a number of parallel grooves about one inch 

 deep and about six inches apart. 



Drop your seeds three inches apart in the little trenches, thus 

 drawing the soil on top and with a small piece of board press it 

 down as firmly as possible. 



Now, mulch your box with grass or moss (and when we 

 speak of moss, now, and hereafter, we mean the gray " Florida 

 moss ") the moss is the best, as it does not pack, and while it re- 

 tains moisture, allows a ray of sunshine to penetrate, now and 

 then to the soil, to coax into being the little embryo which is 

 buried that it may live. 



Let the sun reach the seed box during a greater part of the 

 day — all day, even, would do no harm — if the mulch is heavy ; do 

 not water the seeds more than once a a week, and not then unless 

 the soil is dry. 



More seeds are lost by being rotted by a superabundance of 

 water, than from any other cause ; the soil in which they lie perdu ; 

 should be moist but not wet. 



This is true, not only of seeds of the citrus family, but of all 

 seeds w'hich is the inevitable fate of those that are not. 



This mulching of seeds is not, we believe the usual practice, 

 but our own experience has proved, again and again, that seeds 

 thus kept uniformly moist, will germinate in one half the time 

 required by the same seeds, when subjected to the usual alterna- 

 tions of dry and wet, thus protected. 



But if young plants are desired by the thousands, and tens 

 of thousands, then the seeds must be sowed in the open ground. 



Here too, there is a right and a wrong way ; a careless, or a 

 systematic method of doing the work, and the latter always comes 

 out ahead. 



In laying out the seed beds, it must be borne in mind that 



