e to
forward both Grass and Corn and may secure many of the weak rooted trees
planted last Winter and also make your lay'd trees strike root if well
earthed.

This I design chiefly for some thoughts about improving of your father's
Garden and land of which if you go right you'l turn a good deal off into
Kitchen and Orchard Garden. In doing of which I still think you might
have made more progress last Winter and by so doing you might have made
a beginning in drawing the people towards a better taste in Garden
stuff, which tho' you had made no other profit directly, yet that, if
you had saved yourself only, as to the expence, would have been getting
[profit], as it would have encreased the demand next year.... Your
father's Garden is well sheltered by the houses and rising Ground from
the one hand and by the high hedge of the other, and he has water at
hand. So he may raise any thing in it the climate will allow of. He has
crowded it with fruit trees, too thick even for them to bear as they
would, espicially when a little older, as in that warm place they
advance very fast. By this he loses the undergrowth also, by which he
might make double what he makes by the fruit from the trees, espicially
they being of the most common fruit, which would answer as well in the
most exposed part of his field. So warm a lying spot should either have
been employed entirely in doubled crops for a Kitchen, or, if for fruit,
it should have been in kinds every spot won't produce, and for that
reason yielded more. I incline to think mulberys would have done of
either side the walk at the lower end, as being warm and covered from
all severe weather. If so, one tree of them would have yielded as much
money as half a dozen of the common apples now in it, and would have
taken no more room than one of the present. I am convinced that if
Mulberys will do any where in Scotld. they will there, it being entirely
covered from Weather and yet open to the Sun, except in so far as shaded
by apple trees.... What I aim at is to turn your ground to the best and
most proper uses, the warmest and best to what requires it, and the
common coarse fruits or herbs to places where they will do and the nicer
won't....

Depend upon it there are people in Eden.[81] who have taste, and if you
can once get into the custom of some who have it, will put others upon
enquiring where they had good things, and this will hold in your herbs
etc. as well as in your Fruit. Do yo