You may plant peas, for the earliest crop, as soon as the frost is out of the ground, and it is fit to dig. Choose a warm, sheltered spot, and use rotten stable manure and ashes in preparing the soil, before sowing the seed. Peas don't mind a hard frost, even when on rich or too high ground; and therefore the earlier you plant, the earlier you pick. If you have to plant in the open garden, you may hasten your crop by sowing the drills east and west, and setting a board on the ground edgeways, on the north side, to shelter each row. "Prince Albert" is one of the best early sorts.

Rhubarb is an invaluable plant to those who like a spring tart. You may have yours ready to cut a week before your neighbor's, without the trouble of forcing, if you set your plants in a border on the south side of a wall or tight board fence, and take the precaution to loosen up the soil, and cover each crown of roots with a bushel basket full of black peat earth the autumn before.

Some men are marvellously fond of pruning, and go about cutting a limb here, and a branch there, without "rhyme or reason." Don't prune your standard trees, unless the branches are so unnatural as to crowd each other; and even then, they should be thinned out as little as possible to answer the purpose. Or, in the other case, where the tree has got into a stunted and feeble state, when a shortening-back the terminal shoots, along with a good dressing of manure, will make it push out strong, healthy shoots again.

If you wish to get early crops in your kitchen garden, make some boxes two feet square, and a foot high. Knock them together out of any rough boards; and if you cannot afford to glaze the whole top (and, to say the truth, it is a waste of money), put a single light in - a 7-by-9. If you want a hill of early cucumbers, melons, or tomatoes, dig out a hole of the size of the box, and two and a half feet deep, fill it with fresh stable manure mixed with litter, tread the manure down firmly till there is room for six or eight inches of good light soil. On the latter plant your seeds. They will soon start, with the slight warmth of the manure, and the box will protect them at night, and during cold and stormy days, till the season is settled. Every mild day yon will, of course, raise it up on one side an inch or two, for fresh air; and in positively warm days, remove it for a few hours altogether. In this way, you will get a crop, at small cost, a long start in advance of the unsheltered growth along side, and have none of the bother and vexation of transplanting from hotbeds.

The boxes cost very little, if you make them yourself; and if laid away as soon as there is no farther need of them, they will last a dozen years or more.

* Reprinted from an early volume of the Horticulturist.

When yon are planting a tree or shrub, don't be penny-wise and pound-foolish; in other words, so anxious to have it look large, as to be unwilling to cut off a single, inch of its top to balance the loss of roots. Remember that if your tree would grow six inches if left "unshortened," it would grow twelve if properly shortened, besides making far healthier shoots and bigger leaves, to say nothing of its being five times as likely not to die.

If you are about to turn "orchardist," never buy a large quantity of trees of any nurseryman, on the strength of his own "extensive advertisements. It is easy to say fine things in print; such as "immense specimen grounds," "50,000 trees, carefully propagated under the direction of the proprietor," etc. etc. Go and see for yourself; and very likely the "immense specimen ground" may turn out to be a dozen old trees in a grass plat, and the nursery a wilderness of confusion. Never, in short, buy a large quantity of fruit trees of any man who is a Stranger to you, without inquiring first all about his. accuracy, from customers who have dealt with him, and proved his sorts. Such people, who have tasted his quality, are not very likely to tell "long yarns," though advertisements sometimes will.

The neatest and most perfect mode of grafting, is splice grafting. (See Downing's Fruits, p. 15.) It can only be done when your stock and scion correspond pretty nearly in size; but the amalgamation is done in short-hand. Tie the wound over neatly with a strand of matting or coarse woollen yarn, and smear the whole over with thick "shellac paint," and not one in a hundred will fail.

No large fruit tree is so readily "reformed" as a pear. Many a tree, of twenty or thirty feet high, that stands, at this moment, within ten rods of your door, and bears nothing hut fruit that you would be ashamed to offer at a country fair, may be made to bear bushels of Bartletts, or something as good, in three years' time, by the expenditure of a couple of hours, in cutting back and grafting all the principal limbs as soon as the sap is fairly in motion. "Cleft grafting" is the readiest mode for this sort of subject; and a little practice will enable any one to perform it very quickly.

If yon want to be successful in transplanting, don't be afraid of working in dull weather. If you are shy of a "Scotch mist," buy an India-rubber macintosh. Nothing is so cruel, to many sorts of trees, as to let their tender fibres parch up in a dry wind, or a bright sun. Such weather may be fun to you, but 'tis death to them.

Dress your lawns with a mixture of guano and ashes; one bushel of the former to four bushels of the latter. The earlier in the spring it can be put on the better, so that the rains may carry the soluble parts to the roots. A light coat of this, spread broad-cast, is much better for grass than any other manure.

The best top-dressing for a strawberry bed is burnt sods. Pile up the brush and rubbish you have at hand in layers with the sods, and set fire to the heap; let it smoulder away for several days, till the wood is pretty well burnt out, and the sods well roasted. Then overhaul the heap, chop and beat it up fine with the spade, and, after loosening up the soil in the bed, give them a coat an inch or two in thickness. It will give new life to the plants, and set them in a way to give you an uncommonly fine -crop. an old digger.