108 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
November 29. 
a slight covering of soil, old tan, &c., thrown over 
the whole, to imbed the seeds and nourish the young 
herbage ; and when the thing is properly managed, 
this answers very w r ell; but when the sowing is put 
off till the spring, and, may be, till late in April, the 
next summer’s heat overtakes the young grass before 
it can get a firm hold of the soil, and the experiment 
turns out a failure; the nurseryman is blamed for 
supplying what is supposed to be bad seeds, and 
friends are told it is of no use to endeavour to renew 
their grass-plots by means of seeds, and if they 
want to make a decent appearance under the scythe, 
they must take up the old grass and lay down fresh 
turf. Now, this is one of our most popular errors: 
the old grass must be very bad indeed, otherwise it 
is better than nine-tenths of that which can be re¬ 
placed by ordinary turf in most places. The ordinary 
effects produced by relaying new turf are rather owing 
to the opportunity the change affords of stirring the 
soil beneath it so that the roots obtain a better hold 
of it, and this is certainly a great advantage when 
the soil is thin or very poor; but even then the old 
turf is more likely to suit, if carefully handled, than 
new turf; and, by scattering some of the soil over 
the turf as the relaying is proceeded with, and raking 
back the lumps and stones to be covered over by the 
next stretch of turfing, an excellent bed for grass 
seeds is immediately obtained; and if the seeds 
are sown as soon as the turfing is finished, swept or 
raked gently, and then rolled, a very good carpet of 
most beautiful grass might he enjoyed for years 
afterwards. Now, the whole secret of the thing is, 
that the seeds be sown late in the autumn, whether 
the old turf be removed or not; and, if it were pos¬ 
sible, the grass seeds should be sown in October, just 
when the farmers begin to plant their wheat. The 
farmers are more wise in their generation in this 
respect than the gardeners, and their wheat is as 
truly a grass as the Poa (a genus of grasses), which 
encumbers our soil with weeds, although the fact is 
not believed by some writers—as I might show, from 
the pen of a classical scholar, in the pages of one of 
our best gardening books printed this season, where 
it is stated that the wheat has branched out from a 
species of carex ! We must make allowance, how¬ 
ever, for such lapses, until natural history is taught 
with the classics. 
But, to our sowing. Few gardens are so situated 
as to allow of grass seeds being sown in them in Oc¬ 
tober; the constant sweeping away of fallen leaves 
would either also clean off the seeds or otherwise 
disturb them; but, as soon as these are off, and the 
last mowing for the season is finished, the seeds 
should be sown, and with a liberal band, at once; 
and as it is necessary to add some fresh compost to 
many of the flower-beds or borders every winter, the 
exhausted soil, removed to make room for such com¬ 
post, is ready at hand to cover the seeds with, so 
that the old grass can hardly be seen for awhile. 
This is exactly the process I have adopted here for 
many years to keep the lawns in good order; but 
here, or any where else, I could never get a satisfac¬ 
tory return from seeds sown in the spring, except 
those of the white clover, and the small yellow clover, 
and even these are better when sown this way as 
early as February, but on fresh-stirred or trenched 
ground they would do equally well if sown as late as 
the end of April. Our practice here is to let the 
covering of soil remain in a rough state till the be¬ 
ginning of February, and then to take advantage of 
the first fine dry weather to sow the clovers, and to 
rake down the whole surface, gathering up every 
stone and clod; then to give a good heavy rolling 
twice or three times during the month. After a 
mild winter, seeds that were sown at the end of No¬ 
vember will have sprouted and come up as thick as 
hairs on a cat’s back, (to use a homely phrase), and 
thus they have tire start of the clovers, which are 
easier to establish; and at that early season the 
grass grows so slowly that it is much more hardy to 
resist the first trying weather than if it had sprang 
up quickly, as it usually does when sown late in ■the 
spring. When alterations take place, and old shrub¬ 
beries are grubbed up to make room for an extended 
lawn, the whole surface ought to be chrg as low as 
where trees or shrubs were removed from, in order 
that the whole may settle equally; and, when the 
ground is thus properly wrought, a very respectable 
lawn may soon be made with few seeds by the pro¬ 
cess called inoculating—that is, getting some nice 
smooth turf from commons or road-sides, and cutting 
them into little bits, and planting them over the sur¬ 
face at a few inches, apart, and, by that means, a 
square yard of turf will cover four or five square 
yards of surface. If a good sprinkling of grass seeds, 
and a little white clover seeds, are sown over the 
white, and then well rolled, a cheap plot of grass 
might soon be had. Soot is the best manure in the 
world for lawns, and should be applied in the spring 
and autumn in a liquid form. Worms dislike soot as 
much as salt. Coal-ashes, sifted very fine, are also 
an excellent manure for this purpose, and should be 
laid on before Christmas, as it is not good policy to 
stimulate the grass in the spring, so as to face a hot 
summer with a tender blade. 
The unpractised would hardly believe the great 
difference there is in mowing over a touchy surface 
with the scythe and cutting it with the mowing 
machine. The scythe is far more destructive on 
such ground than the machine, and more so in the 
hands of a careless or bad mower; but the necessary 
sweeping after the scythe scratches the surface a 
good deal, and ought to have part of the blame, 
whereas the mowing machine cuts and gathers the 
grass with the same turn, and also rolls the surface 
in some small degree. Altogether, I like the machine 
much better than the scythe, and use it constantly 
here as a helper to the scythes, and alone for the last 
two cuttings in November, because it leaves such a 
close smooth surface that the best mower cannot 
imitate, and no old bottom grass is left to make the 
first tw T o or three mowings in the spring hard and 
harsh. The worst of the machine is, that it rattles 
along with a noise as bad as that from a railway 
train, and you cannot work it near a house in the 
morning, when people are asleep, lest they should 
awake in a hurry and mistake it for an express train 
which had lost its way, and was coming right upon 
them; but in the afternoon, when people get more 
out of the way, it is a safe and useful instrument. 
After all this, we may sow and mow, sweep and 
clean, and take all possible care of our lawns, from 
March to November; and yet, if we neglect them 
during the winter months, they null soon get patchy 
on very wet or very dry soils. On deep sandy loam, 
however, very little care is necessary, except keeping 
the surface clean; but, it is not too much to say that 
on touchy soil the grass should be rolled every time 
it gets dry, after a frost or very heavy rains. In 
large places this rolling is done with a horse in 
boots; and I have revived a very old machine here 
for rolling—which is really a vei-y useful help in the 
garden—which I can recommend. It is in shape 
like a huge hand-barrow, with raised sides all round, 
