The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming.Shaw, Ellen Eddy
General
The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming.
Shaw, Ellen Eddy
Gardening -- Juvenile literature
The Roman hyacinths are excellent for forcing. They are small flowered,
quite different from the large sturdy Dutch hyacinths more commonly
planted. In choosing hyacinths you have to decide upon the colour and
whether you wish double or single varieties. In general most people
enjoy single flowers better. If you are to use the hyacinths for outdoor
planting or bedding it is perfectly safe just to write for bulbs which
are to be bedded. La Grandesse is a beautiful white; King of the Blues
speaks for itself and the Sarah Bernhardt is a salmon pink. These do
well inside, too. Charles Dickens is a fine rose colour, Prince of
Wales, violet, and L'Innocence, a fine white. These are good for inside
planting. Some may like the smaller Roman hyacinths, which do splendidly
indoors. Very good hyacinths are bought for fifteen cents.
Tulips do especially well outdoors. A capital one for either bedding or
indoor forcing is the Isabelle. It is a beautiful red tulip which is
bought for five cents. The Summer Beauty, a hardy white tulip, is well
worth the ten cents asked for each one. Some of you may like to raise
some freaks; then try parrot tulips at about thirty-five cents a dozen.
A thing to remember about the indoor planting of tulips is this--tulips,
more than other bulbs, are likely to have plant lice, so watch out!
In daffodils you may be sure of the Van Sion. These are worth forty
cents a dozen. You can buy daffodils for twenty.
If you wish to lay in a stock of bulbs for water planting choose, of
course, Chinese lilies, but try, too, the paper white narcissus. These
bulbs cost forty cents a dozen. Buy from the five-and-ten-cent store a
glass dish, and gather stones for it. About three weeks before you wish
blossoms plant a dozen of these narcissi in the glass dish with the
stones as a foundation, and water enough to come up around the base of
the bulbs. It is a good plan to set the dish of bulbs in the dark for
four or five days.
You can grow hyacinths in water too. For this a special glass is sold,
although I have seen children place a bulb in the top of a preserve jar.
It works all right. Bulbs must never drop low into water or they decay.
These, too, should be placed in the dark for about a week.
Suppose you have a quarter to spend. You can make all kinds of
interesting combinations. Three daffodils for ten cents, a hyacinth for
ten, and a tulip for five, give you a chance to experiment.
A word more about narcissus. This is a large family, One gets confused
sometimes with the names daffodil, jonquil and paper white narcissus.
All these are of the family narcissus. The daffodils are the bulbs with
large single or double cups. The jonquil has a cluster of small blossoms
of from three to six single flowers. The paper white narcissus has four
to twelve single blossoms to the flower head.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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