In the Garden Spring-sown onions should be up and harvested.
Days of sun- baking, until skins are crisp as charred paper, are essential. Big onions keep prettily in ropes; small onions keep better and longer in sacks or boxes. Many outdoor tomatoes are showing disease, but it is too late now for spraying. Better to gather fruit at the first sign of colour. Pears have cracked as if split down by sabres ; many potatoes, riddled by slugs, are as light as sponges. There is consola- tion in some excellent crops of winter greens. Late chrysanthemums are also rich with promise. A new grower may find himself confused by instructions as to " taking " buds. He cannot go far wrong when buds are finally formed, but earlier it is very easy to mistake a break- bud for a crown-bud. A break-bud, which is small and appears singly, acts exactly as if the plant were stopped by hand ; it is the sign that the plant is about to produce new flowering shoots. A crown- bud is the final flowering bud It appears as the largest of a cluster, and disbudding is simply the process of thinning out this cluster to the central bud. Chrysanthemums are generally fairly fool-proof, but the exhibitionists' practice of stopping and thinning buds has, I think, frightened many ordinary growers into believing that they are 'flowers only for the expert. Which is wrong, and a pity.
H. E. Bergs.
Previous page
