HOUSE AND GARDEN 
June, 1910 
A Suggestion for Shade Rollers 
\XT HEN buying new shades on rollers 
I always put in a number of addi¬ 
tional tacks, as usually there are far too 
few put in by the makers. Use them es¬ 
pecially at the ends. This saves the an¬ 
noyance of having to re-tack the shade on 
the roller in case of the careless handling 
which children often give them. 
C. K. F. 
The Bulkhead Door 
npHE bulkhead door, an inclined door, 
usually leading into the cellar, is 
usually a nuisance in country houses. 
Half of it is too narrow and to open both 
halves is laborious, for it is heavy. Some 
five years thinking on the subject resulted, 
when a new door had to be made, in two 
improvements. The first was to make 
one part of the door wider than the other. 
By opening one-half the space was wide 
enough for a man with a pail. When 
The two sections of the bulkhead door were 
made unequal in width, with a balance 
weight for the wider panel 
more room was wanted the other half was 
opened. This was one immense advan¬ 
tage. But the wide “half” was heavy. 
Then we balanced that half as the illus¬ 
tration shows. A corner of the house 
happened to be next the door, so it was 
only necessary to nail a block of wood to 
the house (we might have nailed it to a 
post), put a staple into it from which 
was hung a pulley, one of the swivel type. 
A staple was driven into the wide leaf of 
the door and a cord and weight arranged 
as shown. For a weight get a window 
sash weight at the hardware store, 
though any kind of weight will answer. 
To find how heavy it should be, find with 
a spring balance how heavy the door is 
when half way open. For a cord use a 
soft braided cotton line, about half an 
inch in diameter. Be sure to get a pulley 
or block that has a galvanized sheave in 
it. Iron rusts the rope and makes it break 
rather quickly. W. E. P. 
The Care of Fern Balls 
CO much interest has been expressed in 
the subject taken up in the last issue 
relating to the care and fertilizing of fern 
balls that the accompanying illustration of 
Mr. Joseph Elliott’s method are shown. 
Ingenious 
Devices 
Labor-saving Schemes and 
Short Cuts in the House 
and in the Garden 
Make a hemispherical wire basket for your 
fern ball to save bother from rotting 
strings 
To get around the difficulty caused by 
the rotting of the string that bound the 
moss and fern roots together, a pair of 
hemispherical wire baskets were made and 
hinged together at one side with a wire 
loop. Into the hemispherical wire cage 
thus formed the fern ball is put and, need¬ 
less to say, there was no further trouble 
in keeping the balls intact. 
Fern balls are so often improperly 
nourished or entirely neglected that it is 
small wonder they do not make a better 
showing in most cases. The surprising 
thing is that they grow as well as they do. 
The best method of nourishing them is 
with liquid manure. A cheese-cloth bag 
Suspend a cheese-cloth bag of manure in a 
pail of water, and in this allow the fern 
ball to soak up nourishment 
237 
is used for this purpose, filled with man¬ 
ure and allowed to soak in a pail of water 
as illustrated below. The fern ball is sus¬ 
pended in this liquid afterwards and al¬ 
lowed to soak several hours. When the 
ball has grown too large to put in the pail 
the liquid may be poured over it. 
It is really useless to attempt to grow 
these fern balls without this liquid manure 
nourishment. They will not properly ma¬ 
ture and will have to be renewed at fre¬ 
quent intervals. Mr. Elliott suggested also 
that when a fern ball is bought in the fall 
it is a good thing to bury it for a month 
before letting it start to grow in the house. 
Halving the Pull of a Given 
Weight 
COMETIMES the weight used to close 
a door or a gate is too heavy, and it 
is not convenient to get one lighter. If 
you have a spare pulley that you can 
To halve the pull of a weight merely insert 
an additional pulley as indicated 
fasten to the top of the weight you can 
cut the weight in two by lengthening the 
cord and carrying it through the pulley 
fastened to the weight as shown in the 
ilustration. The same weight is sup¬ 
posed to be used in both figures, but it will 
pull only half as hard in the second one 
as in the first. W. E. P. 
Store-Room Under the Porch 
U)N a small city lot where there are no 
out-buildings, and but little store¬ 
room in the basement, space for the gar¬ 
den implements, out-of-door games and 
the paraphernalia of two small boys was 
provided in the following manner: The 
space under the back porch was sided and 
floored with material from dry - goods 
boxes, and a door and two small windows 
made. Here was a dry clean space ca¬ 
pable of holding many things. Under 
each of the porch steps a draw y er was 
made, these arranged, of course, to open 
towards the inside of the enclosure, giv¬ 
ing a safe shelter for the many small 
things that are easily lost. This arrange¬ 
ment kept both yard and cellar neat and 
orderly. Alice M. Ashton. 
