Every gardener of olden times, as well as every practical worker to-day, insists upon the necessity of digging and trenching and preparing the soil before any seeds are sown, or cuttings planted. For this important preparation, the advice of the best local gardener is imperative.

Regarding seeds it is interesting to seek advice from Didymus Mountain's "The Gardener's Labyrinth." "Every gardener and owner," he says, "ought to be careful and diligently to foresee that the seeds committed to the earth be neither too old, dry, thin, withered, nor counterfeited, but rather full, new and full of juice.

"After the seeds being workmanly bestowed in the beds, the gardener's next care must be that he diligently pull up and weed away all hurtful and unprofitable herbs annoying the garden plants coming up."

All very sound advice, quaintly expressed. Old Didymus is even quainter as he tells of the astrological influences:

"The daily experience is to the gardener as a schoolmaster to instruct him how much it availeth and hindereth that seeds to be sown, plants to be set, yea, scions to be grafted (in this or that time), having herein regard, not to the time especially of the year, as the Sun altereth the same, but also to the Moon's increase and wane, yea, to the sign she occupieth, and places both about and under the earth. To the aspects also of the other planets, whose beams and influence both quicken, comfort, preserve and maintain, or else nip, wither, dry, consume, and destroy by sundry means the tender seeds, plants, yea, and grafts; and these after their property and virtue natural or accidental."

Then he goes on to say:

"To utter here the popular help against thunder, lightnings and the dangerous hail, when the tempest approacheth through the cloud arising, as by the loud noise of guns shot here and there, with a loud sound of bells and such like noises which may happen, I think the same not necessary, nor properly available to the benefit of the garden.

"The famous learned man, Archibus, which wrote unto Antiochus, King of Syria, affirmeth that tempests shall not be harmful to plants, or fruit, if the speckled toad, enclosed in a new earthern pot, be buried in the middle of the garden."

A modern authority says:

"While no hard and fast rule can be made, a general practice is to cover seeds with double their own depth of soil under glass and four times their own depth of soil when sowing in the open ground. To protect seeds from cats, bury several bottles up to the neck in seed bed and put in each bottle a teaspoonful of liquid ammonia."