454 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
Septembee 12. 
garden tidy. In the first place, one may save a whole 
season by getting up seeds a few weeks before his 
neighbour. Two hot-heads get hold of a new plant called 
Rhodophrcnsy ; it seeds with both, and both strive who 
will be first in the market with it; the ono gathers the 
seed, and has them “ up” before the other thinks they 
are ripe enough; and after they are thus ripe, he must 
needs dry them thoroughly before he thinks it safe to 
trust them to the earth ; but all this care goes for 
nothing, and is worse than useless; the season is too 
far gone; the seedlings take a long time in coming up, 
the winter kills the half of them, and the other half 
are such weak things that he cannot begin cuttings 
from them for a whole month after the first man ! 
has rooted the first batch of cuttings from his more . 
forward and much healthier stock. But a race with 
a new plant is not of every-day work; and we may pass | 
over it without more explanation, and come to that 
which concerns us all. Without going into the nicety 
of the thing, I may say, that for all ordinary purposes, 
I do not know a single garden-plant whose seeds must, 
of necessity, be quite ripe before it is gathered ; and 1 
hold it as a consequence of this, that neither in the 
kitchen-garden, uor in the seed-nursery, much less in the 
flower-borders, need we suffer seeding plants to remain 
to be eye-sores nearly as long as we have been doing. 
I have, myself, taken up whole beds of annuals before 
they looked “ seedy,” and yet ripened the seed sufficiently 
for my purpose; not by making hay of the plants, 
however, but by keeping them from the sun, and with 
more sap in the stems than they could have if left 
longer in the bed in the full sun. Instead of bundling the 
stems, and drying them in the sun, or in a greenhouse, 1 
did the reverse—watered a piece of ground on the north 
side of a wall, and laid the straw, so to call it, thinly 
and leaning against the wall, and had it watered once a 
day, for a week, or longer; by that time, and by keeping 
the sap in the plants, or straw, instead of drying it, the 
seed would be quite ripe enough, or as ripe as Migno¬ 
nette seed, and not one-half so liable to fall out of the 
pods as it does by a standing ripeness in the beds or ] 
borders. In a smaller way, the best and easiest way is 
to cut off as many stems from a seeding plant as you 
think will carry sufficient seeds for your purpose next 
year, bag those in a paper or canvass bag, heads down¬ 
wards, tie the bag closely, and bang it up in a cool 
place, or shed, this may he done, quite safely, one whole 
week before such seed would ripen naturally; the sap in 
the stems and seed pods will not escape so fast from the 
bags as it would under a hot sun out at large, so that a 
provision is here made for ripening the seeds nearly as 
much as if it were ready to drop from a standing crop, if 
it were necessary, which it is not for such small quantities 
as ono wants for self-use. 
See, then, how easily it is to save seods; to save 
appearances in the flower borders ; to save your 
seeds from scattering about; and, above all, to save 
one from being thought slovenly in other things, if 
you arc caught drying seeds in a greenhouse, or even 
in an open shed, in the usual way. But a few instances 
will render my meaning plainer still; take Mignonette 
again, and say you wish it to flower and keep green to j 
the end of the season ; then, in that case, the rule is this, 
—when a shoot of it was seeded three inches, or say four 
inches, from the bottom, cut it off, and go over all your 
plants of it once a-week, and servo every seeding branch 
in the same way; when you have a handful of these 
shoots, cut away the top parts with one cut, but leave 
half the llowers on each shoot. The pods aro very 
succulent, and so are the stems; bag and tie them at 
once, and keep them cool to the end of the season, and 
you never saw such beautiful seeds in your life; no 
trouble, no littering, and drying, and shrivelling, and 
dusting overy thing and every body who comes near them 
or yourself; all as clean as a pink, and done with as soon 
as thought of. Larkspurs next; in the whole race of them 
you have only to open a pod now and then, and long 
before the seeds are ripe, and so soon as you see the 
seeds turning colour, pull them up, cut off the roots if 
they are annuals, and strip the leaves between your 
fingers, bag and tie, and be off to the Candytufts; the 
best reddish-purple, the large fiat white, and the pyra¬ 
midal white-headed, are the only sorts worth keeping; 
they belong to the same order as the Cabbages, and I 
believe every plaut in this order would ripen seeds in a 
bag if it was half-ripe when gathered ; but have your 
own way, perhaps you would like this seed riper than 
I would gather it, and perhaps you are right; who 
knows ? But perhaps to Eschscholtzias, everybody 
likes Eschscholtzias, and they arc best as annuals, from 
seeds every year—they, and the Clarkias, are a great 
bother if you allow the pods to ripen on the plant; open 
both as you did the Larkspur, and act accordingly; 
keep the pods cool and out of sight, in a close bag; 
those paper bags you had at the grocer’s, or with the 
pic nic biscuits, are the very best bags for all kinds 
of seeds. You have only to write or number the 
name on each of them, and get them out of sight as 
fast as you fill them, so that if anybody calls, oven a 
seedsman, now and then, he will not dream for a 
moment that you are so thrifty, or that any hay, or 
straw, or litter is ever seen in your garden, or about 
your houses, as some people have them every year of 
their lives. Peas,Beans, Radish pods,Cabbages,Turnips, 
Lilyworts and all, may be, and ought to be gathered and 
saved, and nothing seen of them, or said about them, 
from first to last, except the bags, and perhaps some of 
the ends of the stalks hanging out of them. 
I). Beaton. 
LOOKING AROUND US. 
We have now had a treat of splendid weather, enough 
to make the heart of the husbandman rebound with joy. 
Many are the gratitudes and thanksgivings breathed 
from cottage hearths. War, with its attendant horrors, 
has been felt by many of our countrymen, and the 
pestilent cholera has been rapidly traversing the earth, 
sweeping its victims from all lands and climes; but how 
much more perilous would our situation have been, if 
to these had been added the dire calamity of bread at 
famine price. I envy not the human being, who, without 
the blending of the joyful and the thankful in his heart, 
j could have looked upon the fields so loaded with precious 
grain, and on weather so suitable for the ingathering of 
the fruits of the earth. The only shape that even a 
spice of complaining has reached my cars, has proceeded 
from the difficulty that some of our great routine brethren 
of the plough have experienced in finding suitable places 
in which to store the wonderful crops ! 
The first part of the season was a trying ono for the 
gardener. Cold and insects, and sun, without mellow 
heat, made sad havoc amongst us. Much of the mischief 
will be neutralised by the present splendid weather. As 
in the case with ourselves, it will make sad inroads 
about our usual calculations to a continuous supply of 
green Peas; but how beautifully will the buds of our 
fruit trees be ripened. Disappointments, many had, with 
their flower-gardens in the first part of the summer, but 
how brilliant will most of them appear now. Many 
beds, in despite of previous drawbacks, have a compact¬ 
ness and a brilliancy seldom witnessed, and the longer 
this bright sunshine lasts the better they will be. 
Before going farther, allow me prominently to mention 
what has been for two months, and likely to be some 
time longer, the gem of the flower-garden this season, 
the name being taken down by some scores of ladies, 
