PAPER FOR THE GARDEN.
Correspondents from the United States and from Canada continually send accounts of queer experiments in gardening and farming. The value of all of them is perhaps exaggerated ; but it is likely that invention and discovery may do for production from the land what they are about to do for the coal industry. The most promising of the aids to culti- vation is paper. Rolls of rough short fibred paper can be made very cheaply out of almost any cellulose ; and are now being manufactured to the special order of intensive cultivators. The paper is laid between the rows of vegetable produce : lettuce, pineapple, strawberry, or what not. The paper serves a double purpose, if not a treble. It kills the weeds, so doing away with the need of the hoe, and it acts in lieu of what is admirably called by all gardeners, a mulch ; that is it holds and conserves moisture. In such a crop as strawberries it might further serve for keeping the fruit clean. That excellent magazine of the country gentleman's association makes some reference to it as used by growers of Honolulu pineapples (that blue-green crop which adds its grotesque quota to the famous view from the Pali heights). But I hear its use is extending to many market garden crops and likely to extend to more.
* * * *
Previous page
