THE APPLICATION OF MANURES. 
13 
is valuable at all times,) and leaves decayed into 
mould, and called leaf-mould. Where men 
have been all their lives successful in their 
culture, and more so than even good gardeners 
in their neighbourhood, it becomes them to be 
wary of any great alteration. There, experiments 
will certainly be tried upon a small scale if at 
all, and he would be silly that would risk his 
ordinary crops by depending on the success of 
some novel scheme. A sound gardener of 
some experience, in the metropolis of London, 
says, give him the refuse of a pair of coach 
horses, and frames enough to use his stable 
dung and litter, and he will grow any crops he 
requires quite as well as many others do with 
all the advantage of their tanks and flues and 
hot-water pipes. This, perhaps, is going to ex- 
tremes; but certain it is that nothing yet has 
surpassed dung as a manure for all garden 
crops; all that can be hoped for is a sub- 
stitute, and until the dung is scarce, no gardener 
will be anxious to try other things. The most 
important of all points to be attended to in a 
garden, is that of saving every atom of vege- 
table that can be scraped together. The leaves 
from the crops should be trimmed off and re- 
tained, the haulm of peas, the stalks of beans, 
the mowings of the lawn, the cuttings and 
prunings from the trees and shrubs, all of 
which in hundreds of establishments are thrown 
out to be carried away by the poor or devoured 
by stray pigs, should be as carefully preserved, 
to be returned to the ground, as if they were 
the richest manure. In some instances this 
refuse may be dug into the ground at once in 
its green state, in others it may be thrown 
into a proper hole to decompose, and the de- 
composition assisted by means of other proper 
applications, which, however, depends on the 
soil it is to dress. The objection made by 
some to digging in the green refuse in its first 
state has been chiefly the liability to nourish 
instead of destroy the various eggs of the 
pests which infest them, but where it is usual 
to throw all the refuse in a heap to rot, a good 
deal of this is destroyed by the heat and wet. 
The refuse of a garden has been undervalued, 
or rather not valued at all, up to a very recent 
period ; for even outside market-gardens in 
the vicinity of London, there have been seen 
large quantities of cabbage and brocoli leaves, 
and vegetable waste of all kinds, thrown there 
to be taken by any one who cared for it, and 
removed by cottagers for their pigs and cows, 
or perhaps for the very purpose to which the 
gardener ought to have applied it, the manur- 
ing of the ground. Self-manuring, as it has 
been called, has been of late the subject of 
experiment in many places within the last few 
years, and it has been written and talked of 
by many as if it were a novelty, though for our 
own parts we have been in the habit of using 
every description of waste, not only for the 
garden generally, but lor the very place it had 
come from. Thus, potato haulm lias been 
dug in where the potatoes came oil'; cabbage 
leaves, turnip tops, and carrot and parsnip 
tops have been dug in at the quarters on which 
the crops were grown; the cuttings of currant 
and goosebery trees have been chopped up by 
boys and dug in between the bushes; and 
strawberry clearings have been used between 
the rows of plants as the only dressing they 
had; while these matters rotted slowly they 
kept the ground open, and as they decomposed 
they enriched it. The practice of digging all 
the trimmings of strawberries is not common, 
as they He a considerable time in the ground, 
but in the finest piece we ever saw it was 
always done, and that too in a celebrated 
market-gardener's ground at Deptford; still 
the practice has been limited, and even now 
there are those who talk about such things 
being too rank, and object altogether to it. 
But w r e have unquestionable evidence that in 
some places on the continent, where vines are 
cultivated, the leaves and clippings are care- 
fully forked in about the roots as a dressing 
for the next year. We do not mean to infer 
that this dressing is sufficient in all cases, 
because the bulk which goes away in the crop 
has always had something from the soil; though 
we deny that it has taken anything near the 
quantity of matter found in it, because we 
have mentioned, and have proved by experi- 
ment, that much of the contents of any crop, 
no matter what, is taken from the water and 
the atmosphere. But let us mention one ap- 
plication which has never failed us — the leaves 
of trees laid on pink beds, pansy beds, autumn 
planted ranunculuses, and other subjects which 
are the better for protection, so high as to 
merely show the tops, and at first aying on, 
hardly that, will almost rot by the spring, and 
if then forked into the ground carefullly with- 
out damaging the roots, will be found an ex- 
cellent dressing; protecting all winter, and 
nourishing as they rot, they do not harbour 
the vermin so much as might be expected. 
And it is well known, that where leaves are 
allowed to rot into the mould, there is not a 
more efficacious dressing. But in these de- 
compositions something mustw T aste, and there 
can be no better way of preventing the waste 
than burying it w^hile green; at least, such is 
the conclusion to which we came long since, 
and acted upon it; and some of the better 
description of market-gardeners now lay the 
dung on the ground smoking from the stables 
and dig it in hot, from a conviction that there 
is no way in which all its strength can be 
secured so effectually; and we observed this 
work going on at a garden in Kent, although 
there was at the same time from three to four 
