The Canadian Horticulturist Volume 3 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1880 edition. Excerpt: ...the following recipe for making liquid manure that could be safely applied to growing plants without danger of injury. It was was as follows: Put a bushel of the clippings of horses' hoofs into a barrel and fill it up with water. Let it stand for a week, when it is ready for use. Apply it with a watering-pot. All bedding plants can be watered with this liquid every other day, if they are not pot bound. Repotted plants should be watered once a week until they have plenty of working roots to take up the manure. It will also be found excellent for hard-wood plants if used once or twice a week. Two or three weeks after the plants have been watered with the manure water, the foliage generally changes from a green to a golden yellow, moving from the stem down to the point of the leaf, which, how-ever, lasts only for a few weeks, when it changes to a dark, glossy green. Plants under this watering grow very strong, and the flowers are very regal and bright in color. Plants thus treated can be kept in very small pots for a long time without being transplanted. We find this recipe now going the rounds of the American journals, credited to a Baltimore florist, who seems to say as the result of his experience that this liquid manure, applied in the manner mentioned above, is especially advantageous to market gardeners, enabling them to sell plants grown in three and four-inch pots as large and attractive as those shifted into five and six-inch pots, when only rich soil is used. It is added that plants grown in this manner by the use of this liquid fertilizer, will bring twenty-five per cent, more than those grown in the ordinary way; having this additional advantage, that being in smaller pots they can be packed closer, will weigh less, and can be easier...