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When the summer nears its end the surface of the pans should receive less 
and less moisture, so that when the autumn comes the roots will have gone down 
further into the soil, and then the plants should only receive water from below. 
1 prefer eight-inch wooden pans all of the same size, then it is easy to know if a 
pan is in need of water by its weight, at any rate after a little experience, for the 
eye is nearly useless for this purpose. 
With a view to obtaining a nearly dry surface to the pan after August or 
September, they should only be watered (and that only at long intervals), by 
partial immiersion for a short time in a larger pan with water in it, care being 
taken to prevent the water reaching the surface of the seed pan. This, I think, 
with a clean and fairly dry house, is the best medicine to meet the great danger 
of damping off. 
As regards pricking off, it is best to start doing it as soon as the seedlings 
are large enough to handle, so as to leave a good air space around the plants left 
in the stock pan, and to enable the transplanted seedUngs to have more room in 
the new pan to develop. 
The newly transplanted seedlings should have the shelter of the glass on the 
pan for a few days, air being admitted as seems best, after they have settled in 
the new pan. When these seedlings, whether in the stock pan or in the trans¬ 
planted pans, begin to show fair sized plants, they should be moved on again 
to a bed in a frame. The frame may face south if it is really well shaded, and 
great care must be taken to prevent it becoming too dry or too wet. 
When the plants there have made a good growth, they should be moved into 
a nursery. 
I have found that if you try and break a stock of a species up, and work it in 
several lots, with rather different treatment for each lot, you will be able later 
to get very much more advanced plants from some lots than from others, and so 
to gain time and development. 
It is worth notice that even if you have had a fairly long experience at this 
work, there is no certainty as to how you can best get a given species to develop 
quickly, though if the best plants of a batch are watched closely, and also the 
worst plants, the causes of the contrast can often be arrived at. 
The essence of the whole business is first to raise plants, and then to develop 
them as rapidly as may be, and it all requires very close attention for success. 
J. C. WILLIAMS. 
August, 1919. 
238 
