A Fraud In Trowels----A Model Garden Line And Reel----Ideas On Weeders Are Precious--- A Hoe Investigation----More About Grass.

OUR young people get in the way of using certain garden tools and conveniences while they are with us which they don't easily find in market when they go away, and this state of trade makes the motherly heart of Mrs. Tarryer a great deal of trouble and correspondence. The garden trowel, for instance, as administered is a perfect fraud. It proves that the devil is in the garden. The truth is that the regular mason's trowel, in its different sizes - for pointing, etc. - is the handiest and cheapest trowel for all garden purposes, and I trust this sentiment will go into the next issue of general orders by the Masonic Fraternity. A moulder's trowel, also, is a beautiful implement - highly polished and of exquisite temper - for a lady's hand. Now, when an iron manufac-turer dies, or gets on his death-bed, and has given away several hundred thousands, won by cheating Yankee notions, to build churches, his last thought seems to be of some good-for-nothing lot of iron, and he says, "Make that into garden trowels!" Only so can we account for the rotten and rusty old blades we have to contend with under that name. The curved form of the blade is of no advantage, but rather an impediment to the use of the tool in any gardening operation.

Away with it, and let the genuine trowel, honored of all ages, supersede the bogus one. You can split a brick with it or cut a sod if you want to. We are sure of good steel that will keep bright in a mason's trowel.

*********

In garden reels and lines also, evolution has gone backward. Ask one of the agricultural dealers that spring up in a night with a few buckets of seeds in the window, for a garden line, and the chances are that he will show jute bed-cord, or if he thinks us as big a fool as he is, with more money, he will hand out some linen cord for window weights. Jute is the rottenest cheap fiber, while flax is little better when exposed to dampness and mildew. Cotton is ten times as durable in wet and dirt as either, and in the machine-braided form of " banding," in use in our mills everywhere, is the millennial stuff for garden lines. Enclosed please find a sample, marked in feet with India ink, as Mrs. Tarryer has used it with joy for years. Being hollow it dries out quickly, and neither kinks or breaks. "No. 64" is the proper size for the garden. "Write at once to your Congressman for it."*

*********

In foolish garden reels, bogus manufacture can no farther go. It has discovered how to make the most vexatiously worthless thing possible of cast-iron - only fit to stick in trout ponds to keep thieves from drawing nets in the night - and trade is absolutely dead. People have got tired of asking for garden reels. They'd rather have sticks out of the wood-pile. Mrs. Tarryer and I went into seven "agricultural" stores in three New England cities, and in four of these stores she had to make pictures of what she was after to let the gosling clerks know what she wanted, although there were plenty of those cast-iron reels in stock !

Intelligent free-traders and protectionists, if there are any such, will perceive that the dogmas of both sides amount to nothing in respect to garden reels, while the present manufacture continues. The spool part of the reel may as well be of malleable iron, but the present models are faulty in two very important particulars : There need be no spur on the bottom of the reel to stick in the ground and chafe one's knuckles while winding up the line; for by simply turning the line under and up on the other side of the bottom of the spool, when the line is stretched, the reel holds the line fast at any desired point in its length. The second fault is that the rims of the spools are so little wider than the rough rods on which they turn that the line, inside, is cut in pieces by friction.

The two curved, convex surfaces of the spool or reel that carry the line should be 1½ inches wide, and the whole reel should be polished in the tumbling barrel, and tinned or nickle plated. The two cast iron rods, for a good sized family reel, to hold two or three hundred feet of line, should be replaced by polished rods of best tool steel \ inch in diameter, neatly flattened and sharpened at the points, and with an eye turned at the top of the loose pin, while the other pin is fastened in the reel with a shoulder and a riveted nut at the top. These steel pins never break in hard or gravelly ground. Indeed the loose pin is precisely the small bar required to make holes for pea brush and the like.

* E. H. Jacobs M'f'g Co., Danielsonville, Ct., will answer all in-qniries looking towards trade. - Ed.

When Mrs. Tarryer at last found one of those cast iron reels that was big enough and at all worth the trouble of buying, I was pleased to see her call for a hammer and break the cast-iron pin out of it, but I don't think the dealer knew enough about gardening to be ashamed of his league with Satan in it. Still we ought to do what we can for the souls of these dealers, and manufacturers too, who know not what they are about.

The makers of the aforesaid "banding," for looms, don't realize that they are in the way of making the best material for garden lines; neither will they think that it can easily be stretched and printed in foot marks with some color that is fast and will not rot the cotton, unless they are told. But the ingenious gardener will readily see that here is available matter for a little capital and enterprise in one of the many sub-manufactures we need to tie the world together.

In looking over what we sent you for April and May about weeding tools, I am afraid you will think that great concern will run itself; that is the danger of the best ideas printed. As of prayers in church, we are apt to feel that what is said is done. No. Prayers and print are nothing - worse than nothing - unless they move somebody to work. A curious sequel to the hoe business has come into my hands since those articles were written. We have visited two experiment stations, where sets of those tools have been in use for some years. At one of them all shapes have been valued greatly but used carelessly; at the other only the bayonet hoes and grass weeders are prized, while the thrust hoes were being ruined by rust. Yet none of these hoes are made or sold, and the art of them is liable to be lost. At the first station there was what was called a "hoe investigation," as follows:

All the above, barring the missing ones, hang each on his own peg where the eye of the vicious Director can reach 'em every time he goes to the laboratory. Sworn to before me, a Notary Public of the State of-------. [seal].

The above bit of detailed officialism may serve to encourage our friends, the Nationalists.

Mrs. Tarryer insists that I shall say something of the way Grass-botanist Carruthers handles Dr. Fream in the last Quarterly Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society. To me it is a painful incident, but she enjoys it in a way that causes me to fear that women, if they are admitted, will bring rancor and hatred into the scientific arena. She says my fears are nonsense, and even blesses Dr. Fream for the fine example given to our young men of not being too forward with information agreeable to current trade and based on false premises. Fream got a lot of local men to send him sods from the famous meadows and pastures of England, which he "tested" in the Agricultural College at Downton, and so "proved" that the major grass of England was rye grass. This was too much. Mrs. Tarryer thought while the story was going the rounds of our agricultural press, that the sods must have come from newly seeded lands. But Carruthers, at the instigation of the Royal Society, set up hurdles right along side of where Fream's sods were cut, and proved that they were taken from spots of rye grass in said pastures and meadows, and were entirely misleading as average samples of the best English sward.

He is more than an ordinary botanist - reads the close-grazed sod of pastures, and meadows after haying, like a book, as farmers might if they had the right names for their grasses. Carruthers evidently believes that the character of the sward of this planet can be determined by good judges with the naked eye.

From Mrs. Tarryer's point of view, Fream's rye grass sods, selected by expert farmers for striking vigor and productiveness, were the most valuable collection of lolium, for propagating purposes, ever made in England. But it does not appear that either Fream or Carruthers realized the special value of those sods at all - though the latter gentleman wasn't giving away his trade to any great extent in the article in question. Further thought about the nature of grass from across the Tweed would seem to be needed by the English mind at this juncture - intense thought, too, with maybe a bit of practical application to follow.

* The Director is an expert in woods and metals. - Ed.