Page:The family kitchen gardener - containing plain and accurate descriptions of all the different species and varieties of culinary vegetables (IA familykitchengar56buis).pdf/155

 also witheringly discarded by some croakers, who raise the physiological cry of “the old kinds wearing out.” This reasoning is not from analogy, but is merely a supposition. It would be a very easy task to renew any worn-out tree, that had only a few fresh and sound buds left; or even to renovate trees that are in a declining state; in the former case by budding or grafting upon young stocks that have been grown from the seed; in the latter, by scraping off the old bark from the trunk and branches, and renewing the soil about the roots. Our object, however, is not to enter into a detail of the causes, effects, and diseases of trees, and their remedies. These subjects are elaborately treated of in the periodicals of the day. Our object is to lay before our readers a really select catalogue of select fruits, that will be eatable the whole year, from which more pleasure will be derived than by cultivating acres containing trees not two alike, at least in name. We say differing only in name, for the cultivator will find that some fruits are grown under from three to thirty names, so that after selecting with care one hundred kinds of fruit, there may prove to be not fifty distinct, and one-half of these not worth culture. The fruit catalogues of the present day are very imposing bundles of paper and ink, got up to allay the appetite for new fruits. Those whose sole object is to grow for domestic use or for sale, should select such as agree with the climate of the locality, and are known to be both good and productive. Such are those we now introduce, premising that we are under obligations to Mr. Thos. Hancock, an eminent orchardist and nurseryman of Burlington, N. J., both for descriptions of fruits and their characteristic beauties or defects. They are all propagated either by grafting or budding; and as it is our desire that all our readers should know how to propagate, and by what means to perpetuate every variety of fruit, we will briefly detail the operations.