674 



FALL BULBS IN THE SOUTH. 



with manure, good manure, and plenty of it, you can 

 hardly make a failure even under very ordinary and per- 

 haps inferior management. 



We wish to lay particular stress on this. No single 

 item in the business of gar- 

 dening for the table or for 

 profit is of so great im- 

 portance as the matter of 

 " plenty of good manure." 

 Everything else is subordi- 

 nate to it. And for best 

 results it will not do to use 

 merely moderate amounts 

 — we must be lavish, lib- 

 eral t o extravagance — i n 

 this matter. Then garden- 

 ing will pay, not only in 

 money or money's worth, 

 but in pleasure, and in- 

 creased interest in our work 

 as well. 



People should not sup- 

 pose that they cannot have 

 a good garden because 

 there is no rich garden-spot 

 already available Take 

 any ordinary farm soil, no 

 matter whether it be clay 

 loam, sandy loam or sand, 

 if only well drained, and 

 with the lavish use of good 

 manures you can soon turn it into a beautiful garden- 

 spot. You may not be a skillful gardener ; still by this 

 free use of manures, and under the guidance of a little 

 common-sense, you can be a very successful one. 



What Manure to Use. — For old gardens, which have 

 been heavily manured for a long series of years, and are 

 filled with manurial remnants, applications of lime, ashes, 

 nitrate of soda, etc. , will often answer all purposes for a 

 time. When we have an ordinary piece of farm soil for 

 a foundation, however, and wish to make " the wilder- 



Showing habit of Comte 

 Horace de Choiseul 

 Gladiolus. 



ness blossom as the rose," we think the quickest, and only 

 sure way, is by the use of good stable compost in the men- 

 tioned lavish style. The desired results cannot well be 

 reached by any other means. It may also be said that 

 we find stable manure the cheapest means to the desired 

 end. Here and in many other places, we can buy plant 

 foods in the shape of barnyard manure much cheaper 

 than in any other form. We must consider, that any 

 good two-horse wagon-load of the material, put on the 

 land, is worth, at rates paid for the average run of con- 

 centrated fertilizers, not less than $2. Here we can buy 

 it, either from dairy farms close by, from the livery 

 stables in Niagara Falls, or from the Buffalo stock yards, 

 for a quarter that price and often for less, and can lay it 

 down upon the land at less than %\ a load. We thus have 

 a great advantage over other localities. 



At such prices it will be profitable to make free use of 

 it. On the other hand, we also see the good effects of ad- 

 ditional application of concentrated fertilizers, and we 

 do not like to do without them altogether. Some of our 

 plats, we think, are now in such shape, that far less lib- 

 eral applications than have been made this year will 

 give good results for most crops ; and even the entire 

 omission of stable manures, for a season, would by no 

 means endanger our success. 



The Fruit Trees. — All fruit trees on the grounds 

 without exception, old and young, have made a fine, 

 healthy growth this season. The leaves have all along 

 been in wonderful contrast to the yellow, sickly looking 

 foliage of the two preceding years. This is simply due 

 to changed atmospheric conditions. These did not hap- 

 pen to be favorable to the development of scab and 

 similar fungous diseases, and foliage and fruit had a 

 chance to come to a perfection seldom seen. Our spray- 

 ing experiments on trees, however, have been made in 

 vain. The favors of the season were better than all 

 spraying mixtures we might have used ; the trees not 

 sprayed looked just as healthy and thrifty this fall as 

 those upon which the Bordeaux mixture and the ammon- 

 iacal copper carbonate solution was spilled by the 

 gallon. 



FALL BULBS L\ THE SOUTH. 



ULBS are not so freely used in 

 ornamental gardening in the south 

 as they should be. There are 

 many of the bulbous plants which 

 are too tender for open air culture 

 in the north that will give us a 

 wealth of bloom unknown to those 

 who only cultivate them in pots. 



Nearly all the amaryllis tribe are 

 hardy anywhere from central North Carolina southward, 

 and no plants give a greater show of flowers. Our 

 native Ainaryllis atamasco, or zephyranthes, makes a 

 beautiful border for a bed of the large and high colored 



sorts Roman hyacinths, which are unsatisfactory and 

 tender north of Baltimore, do very well here. They 

 begin to bloom in the Raleigh lawns from the 20th to 

 the 25th of December, and continue to throw spikes 

 until March. A bed of these of several colors, with 

 border lines of various colored crocus, makes a pretty 

 show. Of tulips, only the late tall sorts have been sat- 

 isfactory with us. The Dutch hyacinths of the latest 

 blooming sorts, planted here in a full northern expos- 

 ure, usually make a fine show in March — and the 

 whole gorgeous tribe of amaryllis, usually represented 

 here by a few varieties, will make our gardens gay in 

 February and March. Tuberoses, commonly left in the 

 ground here all winter, should be lifted and replanted 



