GARDENER'S CALENDAR. SEPTEMBER.

Southland Times, Issue 562, 17 September 1866, Page 2

GARDENER'S CALENDAR. SEPTEMBER.

Kitchef GrABDEU. — This, lite the spring month of March in our mother country, is the busiest in the whole year with the gardener, for upon the strictest attention to the duties of this month, depends the supply of six more, at least as regards cropping, and also the whole routine of garden operations. In the kitchen garden full crops of peas and broad beans should now be sown ; it is difficult to recommend sorts, as a kind that will do well in one place, will not do so in another, but the best at present known are Bishop's long pod dwarf, to be sown in drills two feet apart, and \Fairbeard's champion and blue imperial at three or four feet, and the taller kinds must have six feet from drill to drill. Sow main crops of short horn and long orange carrots at the middle or the end of the month. Plant full crops of potatoes, summer cabbages, Cape and Walcheren broccoli, also lettuces. Sow lettuce, mustard, cress, and radish. Sow spinach between rows of broad beans, or in a bed by itself. Sow a small breadth of white stone "turnip, but this sowing cannot be depended on as it may run to seed. Put up a hot bed for general purposes, in which to raise cucumbers, melons, early celery, and any tender annuals that may be required to cultivate, sowing the various sorts separate in pots or boxes! Asparagus beds should now have their surface broken up with a short tinned fork, and the earth well broken, to allow the young shoots a free growth. Fbbtt and Floweb Gtabden. — In the fruit garden grafting should be attended to and finished this month, but it should he borne in mind that peaches and nectarines do better budded. The process of grafting is performed in several different ways ; one is to take the graft and pare it down both sides till it forms a wedge-shaped end, about an inch long, then with your knife,, or. what is better a fine-toothed saw, cut off the stock straight across, then put the edge of your knife on the centre of the stock and split it down about an inch and a-half, and on one side of this split insert the graft, so placed that the bark of both stock and graft fit exactly level ; another way is to draw off only one side _of the graft like a pen, then cut dovrn your stock, and cut upwards just through the bark with a shaving of the wood, make a slit downwrads so as to form a small tongue, on the bevelled or cut side of your graft make a slit upwards, then fit the one into the other, taking care that the bark of each fits perfectly on one side ; in 'each ease the graft and stock must be bound firmly, but not too tightly together, and the whole covered with clay, and well wrought with horse droppings. In the flower garden should all be neatly raked, the grass verges cut, as also the edges of all flower beds upon lawns, standard roses and other plants requiring it should be staked and neatly tie.l for the season. Make up all vacancies of the various flowering plants from the nursery beds made in the autumn for that purpose. All kinds of hardy annuals may now be sown, such as sweet peas, lupines, inignionette, collinsia, memophylla, Clarkeia, onothera, convulus, and a great many others. Cuttings of geraniums, fuchsias, heliotrope, &c, should De taken and set round the edges of pots, v and placed in the hotbeds to strike root, so that they will come to succeed the annuals as they die off. Cuttings of double wallflowers should now be put in, they flower longer and far preferable to the single varieties