February, 1890 
£s 
ORCHARD 
CARDEN 
and 
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29 
A Cheap and Handy Propagating Bench 
For starting early vegetable or other 
plants in the house the device shown in the 
^ illustration, Fig. 1621, will be found very 
useful and will work like a charm. Take 
an ordinary shoe box, knock off the lid and 
set in its place a zinc or galvanized sheet- 
iron pan from 8 to 4 inches deep, which any 
tin-man will make at a moderate cost, and 
l resting on slats nailed to the inside of the 
box. If it is preferred not to go to the ex- 
pense of having a pan made, the lid or 
cover of the box may be reduced m size and 
set inside the box resting on slats, four 
inches from the top. It should fit tightly 
to the sides of the box and thus form a 
wooden bed instead of a zinc one. Cut a 
door on one side of the box, as shown in 
the illustration, large enough to admit a 
lamp and suspend by wire a piece of tin or 
sheet-iron about eight inches from the top 
of the box to radiate the direct heat of the 
lamp. The sheet of tin of course should be 
much smaller than the interior of the box 
J to allow the heat to pass freely up. Fill 
the bed up to within half an inch of the top 
with light rich soil, sow the seed, put in an 
Fig. 1621. 
ordinary kerosene lamp and close the door. 
Substituting sharp sand for soil the bed 
works just as satisfactory for striking cut- 
tings. The box should stand in a sunny 
window and it is presumed that the temper- 
ature of the room is sufficient to prevent 
freezing even in very cold weather, other- 
\ wise the young plants would need to be 
protected by a light frame placed over 
them. 
The box may be used in other ways. Pots 
containing house plants may be plunged 
into the bed of sand and forced into bloom, 
or a special box may be made for plants in 
pots by nailing the cover of the box on 
firmly, instead of making a bed there, and 
then with a key-hole saw cutting holes in it 
of a diameter sufficient to let the pots two- 
thirds, or more, of their depth through into 
the hot air chamber. One may thus have 
a genuine hot-house in his kitchen window 
which will serve every purpose in growing 
plants and which can be made and operated 
at a very small expense. — J. W. Gilbert, 
Monroe Co., N, Y. 
See tiiat you have an abundant supply of 
manure. In its absence use commercial 
fertilizers. Select such as are best adapted 
to your particular soil and crop. A combi- 
nation of, say, 20 to 2o loads of stable ma- 
nure and half a ton of fertilizers will give 
quick returns and good profits. 
Vitality in Seeds. 
I noticed, lately, the remark of a corres- 
pondent in an agricultural paper, that he 
preferred seed corn three or four years old 
to fresh seed, as it came up much more 
i quickly, and grew faster. On the other 
hand, writers are claiming that the fresher 
seed is, the better and more profitable every 
way is the product. Most text books of hor- 
ticulture give lists, showing how long seeds 
of each kind nay be regarded as “safe.” In 
the old times we used to hear of gardeners 
carrying melon seeds in their pockets for 
several years, under the belief that vines 
from such seeds would be much more fruit- 
ful. I have not known of that being done 
for some time, and yet there may have been 
something in it. Take beets, for instance, 
I have some reason to believe that old beet 
seed will yield plants with smaller crowns, 
running much less to leaf. Yet my very 
last year’s experience, with a beet of the 
very latest introduction, gave me a crop al- 
most phenomenal in the uniformly small 
tops and handsome bottoms. How much, 
then, is the ordinary gardener's or farmer’s 
personal observation and experience worth, 
on such a complicated matter? In my 
opinion very little indeed; and I am glad to 
notice that our experiment stations are 
studying the subject. I do not anticipate 
its very prompt or easy solution, but I see 
no reason to regard it as absolutely insolu- 
ble, or to suppose that the governing laws 
may not be discovered by patient study. — 
T. H. Hoskins, M. D. 
Besting Land in Grass. 
Twenty-five years ago the market gar- 
deners of New Jersey, mainly located in 
Hudson Co., grew better vegetables than 
the Long Island men, but their limited area 
of land getting less and less annually in 
consequence of the inroads made by build- 
ings, does not allow them to give their 
lands the needed relief of laying a portion 
yearly down to grass, so that their grounds 
have become actually surfeited with ma- 
nure, and for this reason, vegetables, such 
as cabbage, lettuce and celery, do not now 
average as good as those grown on Long 
Island, or other districts adjacent to New 
York, where the land is cheap enough to 
allow one-third to be put down annually 
with some grass or clover crop. I believe 
that in a garden of fifteen acres if one- 
third is laid down in grass each year and 
the balance kept under the plough, that the 
gross receipts will be greater and the pro- 
fits more than if the whole fifteen acres 
were under tillage ; for less labor would be 
required, and manure tells better on sod 
land than on land under tillage. — Peter 
Henderson. 
CATARRH CURED. 
A clergyman, after years of suffering from that loath- 
some disease Catarrh, and vainly trying every known 
remedy, at last found a prescription which completely 
cured and saved him from death. Any sufferei from 
this dreadful disease sending a self-addressed stamped 
envelope to Prof. J. A. Lawrence, 88 Warren Street, 
NewYork, will receive the recipe free of charge.— Adv. 
Grafting the Chestnut and Hickory. 
Under the head of “Nuts and Nut Trees” 
the grafting of the chestnut and hickory is 
considered. In our dry climate we neglect 
to prevent too rapid evaporation from the 
scion while the rather slow process of unit- 
ing with the stock is going on, yet in the 
moister climate of a large part of Europe, 
this is never forgotten in grafting the nut 
trees, the mulberry, or any other tree known 
to be slow in uniting by cellular growth. 
The plan adopted by Mr. Sharp, of Wood- 
stock, N. B. is as good as any, viz: after 
the scion is inserted, and waxed or covered 
with clay, cover the whole with a tight 
paper sack tied at the bottom. Even in 
out door grafting the cherry and plum, in a 
dry time, I always put on what they call in 
East Europe the “night cap.” — J. L. Budd. 
Grafting the Hickory. 
In the December number a subscriber in- 
forms us how he succeeded in grafting the 
hickory. Now if this can be done we are 
on the right track to grow choice hickory 
nuts plentifully. As to growing by graft- 
ing on large trees or on small ones any dis- 
tance from the ground I have failed com- 
pletely, except in three instances. Once I 
succeeded in getting two of Nusdarimes 
Hybrid Pecan to grow on hickory trees, 
large enough to bear next season, and one 
Moyer Pecan on a limb of a good sized hick- 
ory tree. The former were crown grafted, 
the latter a compromise between budding 
and grafting, namely, when the bark slip- 
ped in the spring I made a cross cut in the 
branch, then a vertical cut like in budding 
shaved about an inch above the cross 
cut so as to allow the graft to lie flat 
on the bare wood, which graft was shaved 
down to a point only at one side about two 
inches long, inserted, tied, and well ce- 
mented. Those above named are the only 
grafts of tiiat class now growing on my 
grounds, although hundreds have been set. 
If spared until next spring the plan your 
correspondent describes will be tried. 
Quite a number of hickory nuts have been 
planted this fall, and since reading the 
above a still further quantity will be put 
into the ground, as I recently discovered 
about the finest nut of the kind yet seen in 
all my nut researches, some of which I may 
send you soon. — Sam’l Miller. 
Many people consider the EnglishWalnut 
too tender to stand our northern winters. It 
is true that young trees are somewhat tender 
and often have the tips of their branches 
killed back by cold but as the tree gets older 
it also becomes hardier. It maybe protect- 
ed somewhat during its first winter. In this 
locality — Monmouth Co., N. J. — it suffers no 
injury from cold, and we know of several 
bearing abundantly and regularly as far 
north as Rochester, N. Y. 
