For practical purposes the bush form is the best in which to grow currants; but they can easily be made to form pretty little trees with tops shaped like an umbrella, or any other form we desire.  For instance, I found, one autumn, a shoot about three feet long.  I rubbed off all the buds except the terminal one and three or four just beneath it, then sunk the lower end of the shoot six inches into the soil, and tied the part above the ground to a short stake.  The following spring the lower end took root, and the few buds at the top developed into a small bushy head.  Clumps of miniature currant-trees would make as pretty an ornament for the garden border as one would wish to see.  It should be remembered that there is a currant as well as an apple borer; but the pests are not very numerous or destructive, and such little trees may easily be grown by the hundred.

Clean culture has one disadvantage which must be guarded against.  If the ground under bushes is loose, heavy rains will sometimes so splash up the soil as to muddy the greater part of the fruit.  I once suffered serious loss in this way, and deserved it; for a little grass mown from the lawn, or any other litter spread under and around the bushes just before the fruit ripened, would have prevented it.  It will require but a very few minutes to insure a clean crop.

I imagine that if these pages are ever read, and such advice as I can give is followed, it will be more often by the mistress than the master of the Home Acre.  I address him, but quite as often I mean her; and just at this point I am able to give “the power behind the throne” a useful hint.  Miss Alcott, in her immortal “Little Women,” has given an instance of what dire results may follow if the “jelly won’t jell.”  Let me hasten to insure domestic peace by telling my fair reader (who will also be, if the jelly turns out of the tumblers tremulous yet firm, a gentle reader) that if she will have the currants picked just as soon as they are fully ripe, and before they have been drenched by a heavy rain, she will find that the jelly will “jell.”  It is overripe, water-soaked currants that break up families and demolish household gods.  Let me also add another fact, as true as it is strange, that white currants make red jelly; therefore give the pearly fruit ample space in the garden.

In passing to the consideration of varieties, it is quite natural in this connection to mention the white sorts first.  I know that people are not yet sufficiently educated to demand white currants of their grocers; but the home garden is as much beyond the grocer’s stall as the home is better than a boarding-house.  There is no reason why free people in the country should be slaves to conventionalities, prejudices, and traditions.  If white currants are sweeter, more delicious and beautiful than the red, why, so they are.  Therefore let us plant them abundantly.

If there is to be a queen among the currants, the White Grape is entitled to the crown.  When placed upon the table, the dish appears heaped with translucent pearls.  The sharp acid of the red varieties is absent, and you feel that if you could live upon them for a time, your blood would grow pure, if not “blue.”