fibrous roots, which seem to promote rapid growth and early maturity.

There are but two vegetables of which I wish to speak particularly, asparagus and celery. The first is well known to farmers, as but few gardens are entirely destitute of it, and still fewer that are furnished with enough to be of practical value in the family. It is the most valuable vegetable known for prolonging the season in earliness. It will give ample returns for the highest culture, and will yield the most when neglected of any plant I know. The seed must be planted in a bed, and the young plants taken care of, for a year before the bed is finally planted, but after the bed is established, the harvest is perennial. I have a row eleven rods in length which has for three years yielded a profit of four or five dollars annually, and has at the same time furnished a large family with all they wanted, at least once a day for six weeks. To prepare for the plants, I plowed out a deep dead-furrow. Scattered manure freely in it, and then plowed the dirt back, going back and forth until the manure was well mixed with the soil, leaving a furrow in which to set the plants. These I set about thirty inches apart, and down so low that the crowns were four inches below the commou level. I did not fill the dirt in at once, but worked it down at successive hoeings after the plants had started. I now give it but little more attention than would be required for corn. I manure it after the frost is out in the spring, or in the summer. A winter mulch delays it too much in the spring.

Celery, on the other hand, is valuable for lengthening the vegetable season into the winter. I do not feel such unbounded confidence in recommending it to farmers as I do with asparagus, as it returns nothing with careless handling. It will in no case thrive with neglect. No lazy man will ever succeed with it. The plants may be started by sowing the seed in the open air, but it must be done very early, while the ground is kept moist by the spring rains, or else it must be frequently watered. The plants must be transplanted once, at least, and given room in a rich soil. They should be placed in the garden rows by the first of July, if possible. These rows should be four and a half_feet apart, and the plants about ten inches apart in the rows. I mark out my rows with a broad nosed, shovel plow, which enables me to set the plants about four inches below the level. I never plant in the old-fashioned trenches. The ground must be rich, and deeply and thoroughly cultivated. The plants must be "handled" in due season; that is, the dirt packed around them so as to compel the leaves to an upright growth. Early in October, at the very latest, they must be "banked." This operation consists in building the dirt up on each side of the row, until the leaves are nearly or quite covered, keeping them pressed together, so that dirt will not fall among them. The agricultural papers often give full direc

tions for these things, and I will not repeat them; I will only add, that a person will do well, if he succeeds after two or three efforts, and yet, with some experience, the crop is as reliable as many others. There can be no salad grown which is so desirable

for winter.

In respect to insect enemies, I find the most difficult ones to be the cabbage maggot and flea beetle. The cut worms are circurnvented by summer-fallowing, or by planting so thickly as to permit the loss of a part, while the worms are dug out and killed, or poisoned by Paris green. This remedy is available against all enemies which eat the substance of the plants. For the cabbage maggot I am unable to suggest a remedy. The egg is laid by a small, ash-colored fly, which is easily killed, but of which many will escape. A method with insects, suggested by a member of our Farmer's club, I believe to be well worth trying. It is to wet the plants with sour milk; it will quickly dry, and so varnish the plants with a coating of animal matter offensive to vegetable eating insects. It also acts promptly as a fertilizer, and if it prove a good remedy, is eminently adapted to the farmers wants, as it can be had in abundance at the season when it is needed.

It would be superfluous to go into the details of culture for particular crops before a convention of farmers. I have tried to show how the garden work can be got out of the way of the farm work, and also how it can be made to harmonize more with it, by horse culture and the use of the same implements. The garden can also be relieved to some extent by raising some of the products in connection with field crops. Peas may always be sown in the field, and so relieve the garden of one of the most unmanageable crops which belongs to it. In respect to varieties, we want early, medium and late, and I had rather trust to simultaneous planting of these varieties than to successive plantings of an early one.

There is another thing of which I would speak; the books, and current articles on gardening in the papers, are generally prepared by successful market gardeners. They make their land very rich, and run everything under very high pressure. Their recommendations are too extreme in earliness and in lateness; in high manuring, and in laborious culture for practical value to the common farmer; he would suffer great disappointments in following their directions in the late planting of cabbages, squashes, cucumbers, carrots, or in fact of any late fall or winter crop. It is better to take advantage of the early growing season, for on common land the drouths of summer will hold things stationary for weeks. The results of all our labor as farmers are contingent, in a great measure, upon the seasons, and our gardening is no exception. A late frost in the spring or an early one in the fall, a very wet season or a very dry one, will modify all of our results, so that we will do well to aim at a goodly variety of products,

hoping that if one shall fail, another may win; and we may be assured that good seed, rich land and careful culture are the great safeguards against all possible contingencies that threaten our suc

cess.

FRUITS AND FRUIT GROWING IN NORTHWESTERN WISCONSIN.

A. J. PHILIPS, WEST SALEM.

Read at June meeting, at Janesville.

The only consideration that induced me to prepare a paper to be read before this society, composed, as it is, of men who have been much longer engaged in horticultural pursuits, and who, by experience, have acquired a more thorough knowledge of this important subject, is, that I am fully satisfied that the only way that we can arouse and sustain an interest in these meetings is to prepare papers, deliver addresses, relate experiences. and discuss these questions as a basis for further improvement in horticulture. It is not expected the masses will experiment, hence it devolves on a few to investigate, study, labor and await results, having a two-fold object in view; first, to make it a source of profit to themselves; and second, to grow varieties adapted to our cold and changeable climate that will furnish the masses with an abundance of cheap, healthy, home-grown fruits. Fruits of northwestern Wisconsin are divided into two classes: First, the wild fruit found here, when the native red man was monarch of all he surveyed; and second, the cultivated varieties introduced since that time. Of the first, I have had much experience in gathering and eating; and of the second-well, to make a long story short, the dunning letters I have received, asking pay for trees; the poor clothes I have worn; the lectures I have received from my wife e; the numberless times I have been laughed at and called a fool, when bundle after bundle of trees came to our depot addressed to me; the dead trees I have dug up, and filled their places with something I hoped to be hardier, and when questioned about the dead trees, said that the mice or rabbits girdled them; the time and money I expended for pear trees before friend Kellogg made his wonderful discovery that every cultivated pear raised in Wisconsin cost, on an average, $5 each; the one thousand trees I set, grown on apple roots, before uncle Wilcox made the discovery that apple trees, to succeed in Wisconsin, should be grafted on crab roots; the many standard trees I set and cultivated before friend Jewell, of Lake City, discovered that the Minnesota crab apples were the only safe varieties to tie to, in the north west,

all go to convince me that I begin to know, by sad experience, something of the second, or cultivated varieties in northwestern Wisconsin.

Speaking of the first class of fruit found growing in the northwest, I am fearful I shall fail to do the subject justice, as we are, and have been, certainly blest with a bountiful supply of wild fruit. First in season the strawberry is found in many localities; next ripens the whortleberry, which is found in such abundance in Monroe, Jackson, Juneau, La Crosse and other counties in the northwest, that every year, thousands of bushels are gathered and shipped to eastern markets, besides supplying the home demand, which is not a small amount. Then come the black and red raspberries growing spontaneously; after which comes the blackberry of which a more bountiful yield was never known than the crop of 1876; and later in the fall comes the most important perhaps, of the whole, the cranberry, which is becoming of great importance as a cultivated fruit, affording employment to thousands of laborers and forming a very profitable article of export. Wild plums of good quality are found growing in many places, the quality of some so good, that they formed the basis for quite a swindle on the honest, unsuspecting classes, who ever stand ready to buy anything, if you can make them believe their is money in it. I sincerely believe that not over one in ten of the trees sold throughout the northwest for Miner, DeSoto, and Wild Goose Plum, were either more or less than the common wild variety, and some of them extremely common at that.

This brings me to the last but not the least important class, to wit the cultivated fruits, and as I was just speaking of the plum, I will go on with that. I do not know of any cultivated varieties in this part of the state that are succeeding or give any promise except the DeSoto, that is, if I know what the DeSoto is. I bought two trees of an agent who had his plums in a bottle, preserved, and of course, he gave his word as a man of truth that his trees would bear the same. One of the trees bears a bitter, worthless, wild plum, and the other is a very fine plum, which of course, I call the DeSoto. It ripened well last fall, though late in the season. I have some fine trees I bought for Miners, but the fruit does not get ripe, so I do not regard it as very valuable.

Strawberries are an abundant crop this season, and the fruit very fine. Prices rule low at present. The Wilson takes the lead as a market berry, but the Col. Cheney is being raised to some extent, and is certainly a fine berry. Grapes are not sure of ripening here every season; still there is much of this fine fruit raised. The Concord takes the place with grapes that the Wilson does in the catalogue of strawberries. Of raspberries the Philadelphia and Black Cap take the lead. The Philadelphia, as far as I have noticed, promises an abundant crop this season. Currants are almost a total failure, as far as my knowledge extends,

which is very unusual for this locality, as we always count on a good crop of this fruit, let the winters be hard or mild.

While we have so much fruit that is preferred to the gooseberry, but little is said about it, except when the persistent tree peddler makes his appearance, having just discovered the gooseberry for the millions, and sells, if he can. But after selling to the grower this wonderful gooseberry, Versailles currants, pears on quince stock, or some other wonderful fruit, specimens of which he carries on a paper or in bottles, it is not always his custom to return to the same ground for another canvass, as he feels such a deep and growing interest in humanity at large, that, having supplied you, he feels it his duty to try another field, and I do think today, after all the failures, deceptions and swindles that have fallen on the inhabitants of the northwest, that any man, who can be found with courage enough to start in the tree selling business with his plate book in his satchel, and try to disseminate some new, and perhaps valuable variety, some old, tried variety, or some worthless, untried variety, shows himself a more remarkable person than the man who enlists and faces the enemy on the battle field, and when he leaves the many fields he has operated on here for more congenial climes, he should have a monument erected to his memory of such proportions that all passers by would notice it; for notwithstanding his faults and mistakes, there is to-day no class of dealers that the fruit growers of the northwest are under as deep and lasting obligations to for the fruit they have growing, for themselves and their families, as to the tree peddler.

But as this is digressing somewhat from my subject, I will drop him, by entreating all to treat him tenderly, and will speak of what I consider an important branch in fruits and fruit growing in the northwest; that of apples, as more money and time have been expended on this class of fruits than any other. Notwithstanding the failures and disappointments of orchardists in the northwest, still last year found a bountiful supply of this valuable fruit over this locality; even far up in our sister state, Minnesota. I carried some specimens of Alexander and Red Astrachan apples with me to the Centennial and did not see any finer or larger specimens there. I had the Rawle's Janet, Ben Davis, Walbridge, Price's Sweet, Phoenix, Utter and Clark's Orange, that fruited last year for the first time, and am sorry to say, that three of them, to wit: Walbridge, Phoenix and Rawle's Janet, after passing through the ordeal of steady cold of last winter, show unmistakable evidence that they never will bear fruit again, as they are dead. Still, I have other trees of the same varieties that will bear fruit, I think. Facts are stubborn things, and the sooner we acknowledge it to be a fact, that the north west, as a whole, is not, and never will be a successful apple growing district, except for a few of the very hardiest varieties, the better it will be. I still