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Grapes

their tops downwards to dry, and re-pot them in | make them form a double or flexure in a pot filled the usual manner.

The experience of Hay, one of the best practical gardeners in Scotland, leads him to conclude that even moderate moisture is destructive to these insects. For many years he regularly watered his pine plants over head with the squirt during the summer months. This was done only in the evening. It never injured the plants, and the bug never appeared upon them.

The Grape.

For the grape, the best soil is a light, loamy, dry, limestone soil, with a high and warm exposure, especially to the south. The earth should be kept well cultivated and free from weeds. The most useful fertilizers for the grape are well-rotted barn-yard manure, bone, and lime. For ordinary cultivation the best varieties are, the Isabella, Ca- Diana, Delaware, Concord, Clinton, and the Rebecca when you have a sheltered situation.

Some of the finer foreign wine-grapes, of France, Italy, and the Rhine region, may be naturalized with success in some parts of the United States; but it is hardly yet determined which are best suited for the purpose.

To plant Vines.

Vines are often either trained against the back wall or on a trellis under a glass roof. In the former case the plants are always placed inside the house; but in the latter, there are two opinions among practical men, one in favor of planting them outside, and the other inside the parapet wall.

Abercrombie says: "Let them be carefully turned out of the pots, reducing the balls a little and singling out the matted roots. Then place them in the pits, just as deep in the earth as they were before, carefully spreading out the abres and filling in with fine sifted earth or with vegetable mould. Settle all with a little water , and let them have plenty of free air every day, defending them from very severe frost or much wet; which is all the care they will require till they begin to push young shoots.

Composts for Vines.

The following are the materials and proportions of a good compost, recommended by Abercrombie:

Of top-spit sandy loam, from an upland pasture, one-third part; unexhausted brown loam from a garden, one-fourth part; scrapings of roads, free from clay, and repaired with gravel or slate, onesixth part; vegetable mould, or old tan reduced to earth, or rotten stable-dung, one-eighth part; shell marl or mild lime, one-twelfth part. The borders to be from three to five feet in depth, and, where practicable, not less than four feet wide in surface within the house, communicating with a border outside of the building not less than ten feet wide.

To choose the Plants.

Vines are to be had in the nurseries, propagated either from layers, cuttings, or eyes; and, provided the plants be well rooted, and the wood ripe, it is a matter of indifference from which class the choice is made.

Speedy Mode of Storing a New Grape House.

This mode is only to be adopted where a vinery previously exists in the open air, or where there is a friend's vinery in the neighborhood.

In the end of June or beginning of July, when the vines have made new shoots from ten to twelve feet long, and about the time of the fruit setting, select any supernumerary shoots, and loosening them from the trellis, bend them down so as to with earth, generally a mixture of loam and vegetable mould, taking care to make a portion of last year's wood, containing a joint, pass into the soil in the pot. The earth is kept in a wet state, and at the same time a moist warm air is maintained in the house. In about ten days roots are found year's wood, and these may be seen by merely stirto have proceeded plentifully from the joint of last ring the surface of the earth, or sometimes they may be observed penetrating to its surface. The quently it contains one or two bunches of grapes, layer may now be safely detached; very fre- ; very frewhich continue to grow and come to perfection.

A layer cut off in the beginning of July generally teen or twenty feet. A new grape-house, thereattains, by the end of October, the length of fiflength of fiffore, might in this way be as completely furnished with plants in three months, as by the usual method, above described, in three years.

Another Mode.

A mode of more general utility than the foregoing, is to select the plants in the nursery a year before wanted, and to order them to be potted into very large pots, baskets , or tubs, filled with the richest earth, and plunged into a tan bed. They will thus make shoots which, the first year after removal to their final destination, will, under ordinary circumstances, produce fruit. To prune and train Vines.

The methods of pruning established vines admit of much diversity, as the plants are in different situations. Without reckoning the cutting down of young or weak plants alternately to the lowermost summer shoot, which is but a temporary adopted. course, three different systems of pruning are The first is applicable only to vines out of doors, without any capital alteration. In this method but it may be transferred to plants in a vinery one perpendicular leader is trained from the stem, at the side of which, to the right and left, the ramifications spring. Soon after the growing season has commenced, such rising shoots as are either in fruit or fit to be retained, or are eligibly either horizontally, or with a slight diagonal rise placed for mother-bearers next season, are laid in at something less than a foot distance, measuring from one bearing shoot to the next. The rising shoots, intended to form young wood, should be taken as near the origin of the branch as a good adopted lateral, a greater quantity of the branch, one offers, to allow of cutting away, beyond the not wanted for one of these two objects, are as it becomes old wood; the new-sprung laterals , pinched off. The treatment of those retained during the rest of the summer thus differs: As kept stopped about two eyes beyond the fruit. the shoots in bearing extend in growth, they are The coronate shoots, cultivated merely to enlarge the provision of wood, are divested of embryo bunches, if they show any, but are trained at full length as they advance during the summer, until they reach the allotted bounds. In the winter pruning there will thus be a good choice of mother-bearers. That nearest the origin of the former is retained, and the others on the same branch are cut away; the rest of the branch is also taken off, so that the old wood may terminate with the adopted lateral. The adopted shoot is then shortened to two, three, four, or more eyes, according to its place on the vine, its own strength, or the strength of the vine. The lower shoots are pruned in the shortest, in order to keep the means of always supplying young wood at the bottom of the tree.

Second method.