Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WATERING THE BEDS. This should be done at noon, and only cold water should be used. As soon as one bed is watered close it up tight, and then proceed to another, and so on in succession. By thus doing the moisture in the bed will be evaporated by the sun's rays, and deposit on the glass in the form of a dew, thereby not only forming an agreeable shade to the plants, but giving to them by degrees a shower of dew-drops as they most need it. By this means I escape the great loss of having my plants damp-off at the root; a disaster which too often overtakes those who pursue the old method. It would be difficult, I fancy, to fairly estimate the number of celery plants thus lost every year, but it must be set down at many millions. Since using my plan I find that my plants make as much growth in one day as I formerly could get in six, and the risk is almost nothing. Why the moisture thus condenses may be easily explained, and a single illustration will suffice to make my meaning plain. If we pour ice-water into a tumbler, in a room the temperature of which is 70 deg. Fahr., beads of moisture will at once collect on the outside of the glass. This moisture has of course not oozed through the glass, but been forced to separate from the layers of atmosphere which touch the cold glass. It being a fact that the air can hold more water in a state of vapor as its own temperatureis raised, and of course must lose it whenever that temperature is suddenly reduced. Thus there is much more water in the air at noon on a hot July day, than on one in November when we can scarcely see a dozen rods through the thick mist. Rain is produced in this manner, by the sudden condensation of watery vapor, and dew by the contact of warm moisture-laden atmosphere with the cold ground. In the hot-bed the sam..