Daily Kennebec Journal

Smoke as a Preventive of Frost.
M. Bignon has recently addressed to the French National Society of Agriculture a note giving interesting information on the efficacy of artificial clouds in preventing frosts. For many years he has successfully practiced this. His vineyard thus protected covers about fifteen acres and is divided into five parts, separated from east to west by walks twelve to fifteen feet wide and circled by an avenue of equal width. These walks facilitate the placing of the fires, which are built in a small basin sunk into the earth and filled with fifteen or twenty pounds of resinous matter and some pieces of pine and other vegetable debris. The basins are some fifteen feet apart. In 1903 the frosts were very heavy for a week, and recourse was had four times to artificial fires. The total expense was $400. The effect is stated as having preserved 25 per cent. of the harvest, or some hundred and twenty-five or hundred and fifty barrels of wine. It is stated that any substance can be burned which gives a thick and abundant smoke, such as green herbs, moss, damp straw, tufts of grass, etc., but best results have been obtained in France by the heavy oils which are the residues of gas. The system might be used in Florida and California.—Leslie's Weekly.