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OBSERVATIONS ON VEGETABLES 
CUCUMBEES SET BY BEES. 
If bees, who are much the best setters of cucumbers, do not happen 
to take kindly to the frames, the best way is to tempt them by a little 
honey put on the male and female bloom. When they are once 
induced to haunt the frames, they set all the fruit, and will hover with 
impatience round the lights in a morning, till the glasses are opened. 
Probatum est — White. 
WHEAT. 
A notion has always obtained that in England hot summers are 
productive of fine crops of wheat ; yet in the years 1780 and 1781, 
though the heat was intense, the wheat was much mildewed, and the 
crop light. Does not severe heat, while the straw is milky, occasion its 
juices to exude, which being extravasated, occasion spots, discolour the 
stems and blades, and injure the health of the plants 1 — White. 
TRUFFLES. 
August. A truffle-hunter called on us, having in his pocket several 
large truffles found in this neighbourhood. He says these roots are not 
to be found in deep woods, but in narrow hedge-rows and the skirts of 
coppices. Some truffles, he informed us, lie two feet within the earth, 
and some, quite on the surface ; the latter, he added, have little or no 
smell, and are not so easily discovered by the dogs as those that lie 
deeper. Half-a-crown a pound was the price which he asked for this 
commodity. Truffles never abound in wet winters and springs. They 
are in season, in different situations, at least nine months in the year. 
— White. 
TREMELLA NOSTOC. 
Though the weather may have been ever so dry and burning, yet 
after two or three wet days, this jelly-like substance abounds on the 
walks. — White. 
FAIRY RINGS.* 
The cause, occasion, call it what you will, of fairy rings, subsists in 
the turf, and is conveyable with it : for the turf of my garden- walks, 
brought from the down above, abounds with those appearances, which 
vary their shape, and shift situation continually, discovering themselves 
now in circles, now in segments, and sometimes in irregular patches 
and spots. Wherever they obtain, puff-balls abound; the seeds of 
which were doubtless brought in the turf. — White. 
* Several causes have been assigned for the presence of fairy rings, as they are 
termed, an appearance occurring in pasture lands of a dark ring, as if the grass 
was of more luxuriant and of a darker green. We have sometimes observed the 
ring incomplete. Wherever we have noticed these, fungi have been present, 
which afterwards would spring up in the line of the circle, and to their presence 
we believe the appearance is now generally attributed. The regularity of the 
dark mark calls attention, but the tracks of the fungi, or the lines in which they 
will spring, may frequently be observed to run quite irregularly, showing also a 
dark green mark. 
