ON THE SHANKING OF GRAPES. 
445 
This would be an amusing process to a gardener who has leisure and 
opportunity to make this or similar trials, and to such we recommend 
it as worthy of notice. 
ON THE SHANKING OF GRAPES. 
We have had in our previous numbers, during the last and present 
year, a good many excellent papers on this defect in grapes from 
various correspondents. With these, our friends, we might have been 
well content to have left the subject; but a case of shanking, to a 
rather serious extent, having fallen directly, and rather painfully, 
within our own knowledge, we are constrained to give the details, in 
order to show how very near our own conclusions come to those of our 
experienced correspondent, Mr. Stafford. 
An old vinery, in the neighbourhood of London, built and heated by 
fire-flues in the usual manner, had remained for the last twelve or 
fifteen years very unfruitful. If forced early, there were never any 
fruit to speak of; and, if fire was not put to till the month of March, 
the return was still scanty. The owner was every year disappointed, 
and the gardener was sadly annoyed by seeing his master’s table sup¬ 
plied from vineries in the neighbourhood, or, as it often happened, from 
Covent-Garden market. 
Many opinions were given as to the cause of the failure : one thought 
the smoke-flues were insufficient:—immediately a hot-water apparatus 
was erected over them. Another thought the border in front was 
exhausted by cropping, and that a richer compost was necessary for 
the roots ;—the culinary crops were instantly banished, and a thick 
layer of the richest dung was digged in, and heaped highly over the 
place occupied by the roots. 
It was all to no purpose; defeat succeeded defeat, and the vinery 
was nearly given up by both master and man. The latter at last con¬ 
descended to ask the opinion of an older head. His old friend first 
referred him to the healthy and fruitful state of his vines upon the 
open wall at each end of the vinery, which showed clearly that the 
trees in the house, when moderately or not at all forced, (which was 
sometimes the case,) had not fair play. He next told him to remove 
away all the rank dung and rich compost with which the roots of 
the vines had been so long buried, and fill up the cavity with 
road-sand, brick-rubbish, and leaf-mould, covering all with a thin 
mulching of decayed hotbed dung. His friend, moreover, told him to 
remove all the stuffings of moss with which the front door was sur- 
