PAXTON’S 
HORTICULTURAL REGISTER, 
SEPTEMBER, 1836. 
HORTICULTURE. 
ON THE VIGOROUS GROWTH OF FOREIGN SEEDS. 
It has long been observed by cultivators of both field and garden 
crops, that if seed can be obtained from any distant country, or from a 
soil very different from that on which it is to be sown, the seedlings 
rise more strongly, and the plants continue to progress with more 
celerity, than home-grown seeds or plants. 
We have many instances of this :—potatoes brought from a distant 
quarter invariably succeed better than home-grown sets. Dutch and 
other foreign bulbs grow and flower more vigorously the first year after 
they are imported than they do afterward, and much more strongly than 
native bulbs, though the latter be of greater size. Farmers have long 
been acquainted with the advantage of changing their different seeds 
from high to low lands, and the contrary, and from poorer to richer lands, 
and the reverse. These are local changes, and are found to be advan¬ 
tageous, but on a different principle from the old and usual custom of 
not sowing the same kind of crop two years successively on the same 
spot. The latter is called good management, because it has long been 
supposed that each different species of plant requires the same kind of 
food, and therefore the second crop would be robbed of great part of 
its food by the first. Certain it is, that the same kind of crop produced 
consecutively upon the same ground, is diminished in bulk every follow¬ 
ing year, if manure be also withheld^ but would not be so much the 
case if crops of different kinds succeeded each other rotatively. 
Whether each kind of crop selects its own kind of food, and which is 
VOL. v.—NO. LXIII. 
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