Observations in Gardening for the Month of February.

This is a month of great work for the gardener.

In the kitchen-garden renew the heat of your hot-beds with fresh dung, and continue to sow cucumbers and melons as in the former month.

Make a large hot-bed for forward rhadishes and spring carrots; they may be sown together, because the rhadishes be drawn in March, whereby they will make room for the carrots. The bed must be cover’d with earth 7 or 8 inches thick, and defended with mats, supported with hoops.

Make a hot-bed for Battersey kidney-beans, and all sorts of annuals, except African and French marigold, which may be deferr’d 10 or 20 days. About the middle of the month, upon a declining hot-bed sow colly-flower seeds; also in the natural ground pease, beans, parsley, spinach, carrots, parsnips, turnips, onions, leeks, Dutch brown lettuce, and asparagus-seeds.

Sow skerrits in light rich ground, where they may have moisture.

Plant garlick, shalots, and rockambole, for increase, in light ground.

Transplant young cabbage-plants for a crop.

Make plantations of straw-berries, rasberries, goose-berries, currants, and roses.

Elm-setts should now be gather’d from the roots of large trees, and planted in nursery-beds, and young plantations should be now provided with all sorts of forest-trees and shrubs, which are propagated from slips or layers.

Set acorns of the Ilex, cork-tree, English oak, chestnuts, and walnuts.

Sow the sameria of the elm, and bay berries, all which come up the first year.

Lay branches of several trees to take root. This is the best time to raise any thing that will grow of slips.

Prune fruit-trees and vines; for now is your season to bind, plash, nail, and dress, without danger of frosts. This is to be understood of the most tender and delicate wall-fruits not finish’d before: do this before the buds and bearers grow turgid; and yet in the nectarine and like delicate mural fruit, the later the better, notwithstanding what has been, and still is the contrary custom.

The latter end of this month is most proper to graft pears and plums of all sorts; and some likewise graft apples and cherries in the cleft, tho’ others defer apples longer. The cyons cut off from the trees last month, are now to be used, without having any regard to the notion of the age of the moon.

Now, as well as in October, may be planted the espaliers of pears, plums, or apples, so useful as well as profitable in a garden; for being planted a convenient distance from a fruit wall, they are an admirable defence against blighting winds, and produce noble fruit.

Rub moss from trees after a shower of rain; scrape and cleanse them from cankers, &c. Cut and lay quick-sets, and trim up palasade hedges.

Earth up the roots of uncover’d fruit-trees, and drain superfluous moisture from roots of trees. Lay bird-lime for the bird called the tit, or tit-mouse, which is a destructive enemy to dwarf pears and plums in this and the preceding month, by destroying the buds.

The beginning of this month you may sow auricula seeds in cases fill’d with light earth, and the seeds of the polyanthois in some shady border.

Transplant all sorts of flowering shrubs, which bear the weather; as roses, jessamine, hony-suckle, laburnum, lelac, syringa, spipeas, altheas, &c. You may make layers of roses, pomegranates, phillyrea, laurus-tinus, and other shrubs.

Cut the Spanish jessamine within 4 inches of the stem, giving them fresh earth, likewise give fresh earth to your carnations planted out in Autumn. Towards the latter end sow lark-spurs, hollyhocks, Canterbury bells, primrose-tree, sweet-williams, annual stocks, candy-tufts, pinks, &c.

Make plantations of the lilly of the valley on the side of some shady bank. Sow orange and lemon kernels in pots; set the pots in hot-beds; the kernels are to be used as soon as taken out of the fruit. Shift such myrtles as require large pots, at the same time shaving off the outside fibres of their root, and if there be occasion, prune their heads pretty close. Turn and skreen Mould for the use of next month, and continue to roll gravel-walks after rain and frost.