1897 - In Praise of Petunias as Winter Houseplants

When I read that petunias made delightful winter companions my eyebrows shot up!  It never occurred to me petunias could be a house plant all winter long. 

However, a lady from Fond du Lac, Michigan sings their praises in this letter from Vick's Monthly Magazine, October 1897.

I would say in return to all lovers of flowers, take up some late Petunias, cut them back pretty well and pot them for the house. I did so with some a few years ago. I had several beautiful varieties, and they commenced to bloom in February, and were almost covered with flowers until June. 

They were the most interesting plants I have ever had in winter, for we never knew what a morning would disclose; sometimes a blossom would be partly double, or two blossoms would have grown together, or one would be fringed on one side, or present a number of queer little points around the edge; and nature played various other freaks with her late-blooming beauties.

 I think any one who will pot a few Petunias for winter will be fully repaid for his trouble, and if you object to the oddly-fashioned blossoms, you can pinch them off, and yet leave your plants covered with blooms. The small, purplish-rose Petunia, with white throat, seems most liable to play all these queer tricks.

—Mrs. C. E. F., Fond du Lac, Wis.

Another enthusiastic woman wrote in earlier...

The Magazine of Horticulture, Botany, and All Useful Discoveries reminds us in 1846 to start petunias for winter houseplants from cuttings in August.  If you forget they say October is the month to dig up any plant that looks promising to bring in for the winter.

While 

While Arthur's Home Magazine gives the following advice in 1856.

A little earth is thrown over one of the procumbent branches, which causes it, in a few  weeks, to develop roots in the soil.  The branch is then cut from the stem, and potted.   Those young plants which are obtained in this  manner are the most capable of being preserved  in the house during the winter. 

Here are varieties from 1895 - Vick's Catalog

Good advice from 1886 - As a window plant, many amateurs have said nothing but good words for the Petunia. It is a refreshing green, a robust grower, and a reasonably profuse bloomer, but it must not be allowed to become too dry, or red spider will make sad havoc with it. I have never used it for winter flowering, as I have not the window-room necessary, but I find no difficulty in wintering my double Petunias in a cool, frost proof, and dry cellar. The Petunia is well worthy a place in any garden, and will amply repay you for the little trouble necessary to grow it well.

More advice, 1889 - If you are fond of the pretty striped Petunias send for a packet of seeds of the Red Star variety. It is one of the best regularly striped Petunias in the market. Each flower has a white star in the centre. For ease of cultivation and profuse flowering the Petunia has no superior. It is an admirable flower for the Winter window garden. Sow some seeds in Midsummer and pot a few of the plants in the Fall if you want something very satisfactory for Winter blooming.  Success with Flowers, a Floral Magazine

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Here are plants from a winter when I remembered to  follow my own advice of cut them back in later summer to get bushy again before bringing them in.  They will get aphids usually, but the sticky petunias (not all are sticky) trap them pretty well!  Keep your eye out for aphids and wash them off or whatever you like to do.

1882 - Eureka Manure

I love early advertising!

This appeared in England in Gardening, Illustrated: For Town and Country. A Weekly Journal for Amateurs and Gardeners, Volume 3

early Daniel's Eureka Manure or Concentrated Essence of Plant Life

Pumpkin Beer to the Rescue! Connecticut Flip

In a History of New York During the Revolutionary War the diet of a hale old general was noted to contain a great deal of "flip" which was "A mixture of New England rum, pumpkin beer, and brown sugar. In winter this liquor is made warm by putting a red-hot poker into it. Every public-house in Connecticut has in the winter season one of these pokers (known among them by the name of loggerheads) always in the fire, ready upon the arrival of travellers or the arriving in of company. It is far from being disagreeable liquor, and is universally drank in Connecticut."

 The following from Stage-coach and Tavern Days by Alice Morse Earle can be found in Project Gutenburg if you would like to read more. 

"Other names for the hospital loggerhead were flip-dog and hottle. The loggerhead was as much a part of the chimney furniture of an old-time New England tavern and farm-house as the bellows or andirons. In all taverns and many hospitable homes it was constantly kept warm in the ashes, ready for speedy heating in a bed of hot coals, to burn a mug of fresh flip for every visitor or passer by. Cider could be used instead of beer, if beer could not be had. Some wise old flip tasters preferred cider to beer. Every tavern bill of the eighteenth century was punctuated with entries of flip. John Adams said if you spent the evening in a tavern, you found it full of people drinking drams of flip, carousing, and swearing. The old taprooms were certainly cheerful and inviting gathering-places; where mine host sat behind his cagelike counter surrounded by cans and bottles and glasses, jars of whole spices and whole loaves of sugar; where an inspiring row of barrels of New England rum, hard cider, and beer ranged in rivalry at an end of the room, and

[Pg 113]“Where dozed a fire of beechen logs that bred
Strange fancies in its embers golden-red,
And nursed the loggerhead, whose hissing dip,
Timed by wise instinct, creamed the bowl of flip.”

These fine lines of Lowell’s seem to idealize the homely flip and the loggerhead as we love to idealize the customs of our forbears. Many a reader of them, inspired by the picture, has heated an iron poker or flip-dog and brewed and drunk a mug of flip. I did so not long ago, mixing carefully by a rule for flip recommended and recorded and used by General Putnam—Old Put—in the Revolution. I had the Revolutionary receipt and I had the Revolutionary loggerhead, and I had the old-time ingredients, but alas, I had neither the tastes nor the digestion of my Revolutionary sires, and the indescribable scorched and puckering bitterness[Pg 114] of taste and pungency of smell of that rank compound which was flip, will serve for some time in my memory as an antidote for any overweening longing for the good old times."

I live next to Putnam, Connecticut.  I didn't know I was bang in the middle of the land of flip!  

In another book, Customs and Fashions in Old New England, Earle reported "Flip was a vastly popular drink, and continued to be so for a century and a half. I find it spoken of as early as 1690. It was made of home-brewed beer, sweetened with sugar, molasses, or dried pumpkin, and flavored with a liberal dash of rum, then stirred in a great mug or pitcher with a red-hot loggerhead or hottle or flip-dog, which made the liquor foam and gave it a burnt bitter flavor."

"...The colonists at first were deprived of their beer. One of the earliest New-England poets, in boasting of the comforts around him, does it regretfully, after this fashion:

If barley be wanting to make into malt,
We must be contented, and think it no fault.
For we can make liquor, to sweeten our lips,
Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.

They could not, however, have long been confined to their pumpkin-beer, for the General Court of Massachusetts, in 1687, regulated the brewers in the colony, and enacted that "no person shall brewe any beare, or malte, or other drinke, or sell in gross, or by retaile, but only such as shall be licensed by this Courte, on pain of £100;..."

Appletons' Journal, Volume 13

"Colonial Americans also drank their pumpkin. An enterprising person can make an alcoholic beverage out of almost anything, and the Pilgrims seem to have been first to make pumpkin beer or ale. ...

The Pilgrim recipe was said to involve a mixture of persimmons, hops, maple syrup, and, of course, pumpkin. 

Further south in Virginia, planter Landon Carter mentions pumpkins in his diary in 1765. He, too, concocted some sort of alcoholic beverage from fermented pumpkins. He christened it pumperkin.

Perhaps he used a method similar to an anonymous recipe of 1771:

Let the Pompion be beaten in a Trough and pressed as Apples. The expressed juice is to be boiled in a copper a considerable time and carefully skimmed that there may be no remains of the fibrous part of the pulp. After that intention is answered let the liquid be hopped culled fermented & casked as malt beer."

CW JOURNAL : AUTUMN 09 : SOME PUMPKINS! 

Rambo the Apple! - 1893 - Henry C. Rupp & Son, Cumberland Nurseries, Pennsylvania

This is an interesting catalogue if you like old variety names as much as I do.  There are nice fruits and roses.
The names alone are worth the reading; if you are interested in the fruit or plant, all the better!

I did not find any information about Rupp or his sons yet.   There are quite a few Rupps online, but not this one.   (Larger sized pages are displayed below.)

But, first the Rambo apple history.

• The Apples of New York  (Above illustration)

• When chatting about the coddling moth on apples, the writer remembered how keen eyed boys can see what their elders can not!
  "About this matter of sharp juvenile eyesight, we on one occasion came near getting a castigation because we alleged that we saw thousands of little white "snakes" in the vinegar, and could not demonstrate to our elders that they were there. But, to return to our subject, it really does not seem to us that there are more codlings now than there were fifty or sixty years ago, although, in proportion to the population, there must have been a greater abundance of apples then than now. It is also very doubtful to our mind, notwithstanding all the clamor raised against the codling moths, or all the remedies that have been discovered and applied to their destruction, whether their number has been greatly diminished, or, perhaps, ever will be. It seems to us that the remedy is to increase and improve the quantity and health of the apple crop. One discovery we boys made, or thought we made, more than fifty years ago, was that the rambo apples were less infested by the worms than any other variety. We often visited the apple bins in the dark, after we had retired to bed—for they were in proximity to our sleeping apartment up to the holidays at least—and we were always sure to select the rambo bin, because we felt that these might be eaten in the dark without the chances of swallowing worms. And yet the rambo has become obsolete, and in many places entirely extinct, notwithstanding that taking it "all in all," as an eating apple, it never has been superceded. It is true its quality becomes impaired after the month of January or February, but from early autumn up to the Christmas holidays, it was king in our early days. As a culinary fruit the rambo even then was considered inferior to the vandevere or the grindstone, two old varieties that have also become obsolete. The romanite, we thought, also shared in exemption from the codling. We thought the codling more partial to apples of a dryer and more granular texture than the rambo and the romanite."

1880 - The Lancaster Farmer 

THE RAMBO APPLES

• Charles Downing, in a paper on nomenclature, said:"It has been pretty clearly shown, of late, that the origin of Summer Rambo or Western Beauty, was at Marietta, Pennsylvania, on the premises of John Orosh, about the year H15, and was first called Big Rambo, afterward GrosU, and now is known in most localities in Pennsylvania as SummerRambo and Large Rambo, and in Ohio and other portions of the West as Western Beauty, etc
  "The following are the synonyms in different sections of the country:"Summer Ranbo or Western Beauty, Big Rambo, Grosh, Large Rambo, Large Summer Rambo, Grosh's Mammoth, Mammoth Rambo (Ohio Beau'y of some), Musgraves' Cooper, CumminB' Rambo, Pickaway Rambo (French Rambo of some), Naylor Rambo, Sweet Rambo incorrectly.
  "There is another Big Rambo, or more properly Hoadley, which was raised by Mrs. Robert Ramsey, of Millbrook, Ohio; fruit of large size, rounder in form than the above, and not as good in quality, but valuable for culinary uses and for market.
  "There is claimed to be two other summer Rambos, one from Pennsylvania and the other from Michigan, which are smaller in size, and better in quality, but there is no positive knowledge of their identity so far as I can learn.
  "The Summer Rambo of Cox and Downing, which has for its synonyms Rambour Franc and Rnmbour d'Ete, is the Rambour Franc, a very old foreign variety, ripening in September, and more suited for culinary uses than for the table.
  "Some years since, I received from Andre Leroy, of Angers, trees of Rambour d'Ete, which have fruited several times, and it is quite distinct from any of the above, more oblate and conic in form, tree more spreading, and the fruit a month later in ripening; it is more valuable for culinary uses than for the table."

1878 - Annual Report of the Ohio State Board of Agriculture