August 12. 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
305 
the vines are affected ov not, for we have never expe¬ 
rienced any damages from its use, when applied judici¬ 
ously. In sprinkling, or painting, flues or pipes, we 
hold one maxim as our safeguard—never to apply it to 
any surface which can by any possibility become so 
Hot as that it could not be comfortably grasped by the 
| hand whilst counting twenty. This, although rule-of- 
thumb work, has ever proved a safe proceeding. What 
is termed a small house—say twenty feet long by twelve 
feet wide—may receive three ounces of sulphur at any 
time, and four or five to an ordinary-sized house. 
To return: after the house is cleansed, let the vines be 
thoroughly examined, and the surplus laterals removed, 
in order to do justice to the ripening of the fruit. Let 
all beware of so reducing them as to suffer the sun to 
1 shine immediately on the fruit; no greater mistake can 
be committed. Such practice is sure to injure both 
size, colour, and flavour. The finest and blackest 
grapes we have ever seen have been ripened in deep 
shade,—strange as it may seem. Let the maxim, then, 
be to remove just as much of the later spray as shades 
the earlier foliage, that is, providing it is still in a 
healthy condition; if not, decaying or injured foliage 
may be removed, and later growths be permitted to 
supply its place. We hold it good practice, however, 
to pinch all growing points when the fruit is changing 
colour; this causes a temporary cessation of active 
growth, and, by consequence, a higher concentration of 
the juices in the bearing branches ; but as soon as the 
ripening is complete, the vines, if healthy, will make 
another effort to refill their partially-exhausted vessels, 
thus providing for a lively vital action in the ensuing 
spring. When grapes are really ripe, and not required 
to hang many weeks on the tree, most of the early 
laterals near the fruit may be cut clear away. This is 
the practice of most good grape growers, and is urrder- 
stood to render the buds which must produce the en¬ 
suing year’s crop more plump and firm. 
If any dull weather occurs, fires may occasionally be 
used; many late crops are seriously injured through 
low temperatures, accompanied with much moisture 
of atmosphere. Ample ventilation, day and night, is 
the thing on which we must depend for colour and 
flavour; depend on it, a coddling system will not 
produce first-rate grapes. And let our readers remember, 
that the ripening process should be slow; slow, through 
abundance of air. We believe that the necessary slow¬ 
ness of the processes in our clime, as compared with 
tropical climates, is the reason why first-rate grapes in 
Britain are more luscious than the foreign ones ; albeit, 
perhaps, not so sweet. 
It may here be suggested to those who must introduce 
pot plants to their vinery very early in the autumn, that 
it will be well not to encourage any late growths, but to 
persist in stopping every growth from the moment the 
grapes are ripe. It will be necessary, also, to remove 
every lateral about the end of August, in order by such 
means to encourage a free circulation of air; as essential 
to the plants as to the grapes. We will speak of winter, 
or late grapes, shortly. It. Errington. 
STOYE PLANTS IN THE OPEN AIR. 
Removing stove plants to the greenhouse when the 
greenhouse plants are turned out-of-doors for the sum¬ 
mer, is a practice almost as old as the use of glass 
houses for plants. Most of the old authors recommend 
it, and many writers of the present day subscribe to it, 
and yet one may travel a long way in the country and 
not see a greenhouse converted into a stove. The most 
that is done by the best gardeners in these days is, 
whei'e a late vinery is forced for six weeks after the end 
of April, to remove the soft-wooded stove plants then 
in rapid growth, to this vinery, and keep them there as 
long as the vines do not shade them too much. 
The next, and a better step, is a close cold pit, almost 
a new term in our garden writings. More than two- 
thirds of our best stove plants will do better, or, at least, 
as well, in a close cold pit, from the end of May to the 
end of September, than in the stove. This is the plan 
which is followed in most of the London nurseries, but 
in some of them a slight bottom-heat, with dung or tan, 
is provided for the close pits; just as they do who plant 
out melons for a summer crop in cold frames, or as the 
cottager does with his cucumber bed in May, give a 
slight bottom-heat to start with, and after that take the 
chances of the season. Each of these ways proving in 
detail the true theory of night temperature. 
Mr. Appleby has gone round the Pine-Apple Place 
nursery with me of an afternoon, opening the lights of 
whole ranges of long “ close cold pits,” filled with stove 
plants, which were watered overhead two hours before, 
and were now in a damp close heat of, perhaps, 90° a 
little before sunset, and that without any bottom-heat, 
only from the afternoon sun, and before the sun got on 
them next morning the temperature would be down as 
low as 50°, and sometimes lower, yet nothing could look 
more thrifty than did the plants. 
Now, if you take the best constructed greenhouse in 
England, and get the best gardener in the country to 
look after it, he could not grow those stove plants in it 
half so well as they were grown in the close cold pit; 
but why the thing cannot be done no one has ever yet 
explained. The reason why plants grow better in pits 
where dung-heat is applied, is accounted for by saying 
that the leaves suck in so much of the bad smell, which : 
is ammonia, but in a pit with only bricks and glass, 
with wooden framing, there can be no more ammonia 
than in a greenhouse made of the same materials. 
Here, then, is a fix, the cause of which we do not un¬ 
derstand properly, but the effects arc familiar to every 
gardener of note in the kingdom. 
But here step in Mr. Appleby and Mr. Eish, and wish 
me fixed on safer ground, so I step out into the flower- 
garden, and walk down between an avenue of Russelia 
juncea, some in pots or vases, and others planted in 
circles on the grass, like so many standard roses. They 
are all in bloom, and better than you see them now in 
the stove, but not better than they were flowered when 
they were first brought out for competition fifteen or 
sixteen years ago, and there are one hundred stove 
plants in this country that would give the same exotic 
character to a straight walk in a flower-gardeu, and, 
what is as much to the purpose, it is either in the small 
cottage garden, or in the most extensive, that this style 
seems more appropriate, because the man of rods and 
yards may say that his space being so confined he must 
create interest for it by giving it this foreign aspect, 
and in such large places as Chatsworth and Trentham 
Hall, you expect to meet with every kind of style, as 
well as new arrangements and original ideas, exempli¬ 
fied every year. What I wanted to effect by this tres¬ 
passing on the greenhouse and stove departments is to 
knock on the head, and altogether crush, the old and 
foolish notion that a greenhouse is a good place for 
stove plants in summer, and a better stepping-stone 
than any other way when you want to turn stove plants 
out-of-doors into the flower-garden, as I am convinced 
more and more every year, that many plants, now spoiled 
by too much uniform heat in our stoves, would flourish 
and do much better out-of-doors from the end of June 
or middle of July. 
Many years back I had been compelled to turn nearly 
five hundred stove plants out-of-doors at the end of 
July, owing to some alterations that were to be made in 
the houses, and before I could get them in again I had 
to mat over some Ixoras to save them from the early 
