When the month of November comes, it is worth while to look about a little, and see how yon stand in the garden and orchard. Yon must be a miracle of expertness if you hare not failed in some crop or other, or if some tree or plant has not baffled your wits. Well, this being the case, now is the time to look about, and resolve either that you will succeed better next year, or that you will abandon that crop altogether.

So, go into your kitchen garden. If your soil is poor, or worn out and full of insects, this is the very time of all others to doctor it; and here is my prescription, which I have proved over and over again: Clear off the plot of ground to be renovated, and cover it with a good dressing of fresh stable manure, with' the litter in it. Begin at one side of the plot, and throw up the soil into ridges, digging it about eighteen inches deep, and mixing the manure through the soil as you dig. Here let it lie all winter. The atmosphere and the frost will have a grand chance to do their best in bettering the quality of the soil itself; and the essence of the manure will not.only be all taken up by the soil, but its coarseness will be broken down by the spring, so that your plot will be in the best possible order for vegetables when the swallow comes.

If you are troubled with grubs and insects in the ground (and you must be something more than a " big bug" yourself, if yon are not), then you must also treat it with a dose of salt Scatter any refuse or coarse cheap salt over the earth, before you begin to ridge it up, at the rate of a bushel to the eighth part of an acre - or eight bushels to the acre. Put on at this season, it will do no harm to anything vegetable, and will thoroughly rid you of these enterprising little gentry, that crawl out of the ground in May and June, and quietly play Guy Fawkes to the roots and stems of the tenderest things that the pot boils. Besides, leaving out of sight the virtue of salt as a manure, it helps all dry soils amazingly, giving them greater attraction for moisture, and greater power to hold it in dry weather; and that is no mean thing for a crop that gets thirsty in mid-summer.

In the review of your forces at this season, before they go into winter quarters, it is ten to one but you will find, staring you in the face - possibly not ten paces from your door-steps - some excellent old friends, whose acquaintance you begin to be ashamed of, and are sorely tempted to cut at once. I mean some good old fruit trees, still very sound and healthy, but utterly refusing, for years past, to bear any good fruit. Possibly they are Virgalieu or Butter Pears, Pippin or Pearmain Apples, whose good name is a thing handed down to you by your ancestors; and you are therefore not a little sorry to cut them. Don't do it. Let us have a little talk over these trees.

Did they ever bear good fruit in this soil? " Bless you, yes! - such fair golden skins, and luscious, melting flesh, as I seldom see now-a-days." How long ago is it that they have stopped bearing such fruit? " Say a dozen or fifteen years." What have you done for them? " Not much - scraped the bark, washed it with soapsuds - spread a little compost over such as stand in the grass. Those that stand in the garden, you know, are in good rich soil; so, of course, they could not want for manure".

This is what my friend says; but I don't believe a word of it - I mean of the last part, that they "don't want for manure." If I were a "Hoosier," or a "Buckeye," I should say they don't want "anything else." Have not they the game atmosphere to breathe, the same rain to drink, the same climate to enjoy, as when they bore the fine crops of fruit which you lament? What has changed? Nothing - absolutely nothing - but the soil.

Need I go any farther to establish this? I hope not. But the soil is probably pitiably run out - run out, past the power alone of stable manure to bring it up again. It is run out, as the chemists say, in " lime and the phosphates." But it can be renovated, just as surely as there is manure, and, lime, and the phosphates to be had; and you may set about it now, if you please, for this is the nest time in the world to begin.

Now, to do this well and thoroughly will cost from two to three dollars a tree, labor and all included. An old officer of this sort, that has been off duty and on half pay for ten or fifteen years, can't be brought into active service again without squaring up old accounts somewhat; and you must make up your mind to this, or else have no further fruits from the old veterans.

Supposing we commenced with a middle-aged pear or apple-tree, with a sound constitution, which has been sulking for some time past on half pay. Now, it is all very well to say that this tree don't want animal manure. Its roots have been in the same place for twenty-five or thirty years, with only a little sprinkling of something stimulating over the tops of the soil, which the grass, indeed, has pretty much taken to itself, or a slight yearly dressing of compost (if it has stood in the garden) which the vegetables have devoured. Look at its little short-jointed shoots and unthrifty growth, and you will see that, first of all, it wants manure.

Very well. Now clear away everything in the shape of trees, shrubs, bushes, or vegetables of any kind that stand within fifteen feet of the trunk of this tree. Next, bring a good two-horse wagon-load of fresh stable manure, and trench it under as deeply as the roots will let you, and particularly beyond where the roots extend. It is as foolish to put manure within five or six feet of the trunk of a tree, as it would be to pour drink over the back of a thirsty man. At the very outside of the roots, trench the soil two feet deep, and mix the manure with it, leaving it rough and loose for the winter; for it is there - at this outside limit-that the roots will get a good living again.

But this is not the whole which is to be done. Remember that lime and the phosphates must be supplied, for it is above all these that old soils grow poor in. It would not do to put them in with the fresh manure, since they would not agree well together, but would go to decomposing one another, instead of making a succession of good dinners for the " feeders" - that is to say, the little fibres of the roots.

But next spring, as early as the soil is dry, you must apply to each large tree, manured in the fall, two bushels of ashes and a peck of plaster or gypsum, and, if it be a pear-tree, a half bushel of bone dust. If it is an apple-tree, yon may substitute a peck of air-slaked lime for the plaster. Spread this evenly over the soil that was dug and manured last autumn, and mix it through the whole with a stout three-pronged fork. This will bring the soil to a good condition again; and the old tree will speedily commence making new roots, setting new fruit buds, and, the next season, begin to bear fine fruit again. And this I do not give you from theory, but from actual trial, under the most unfavorable circumstances.

I do not tell you to prune your tree, because I very much doubt the wisdom of it the first year. I would only see that the bark is clean and smooth; and give it a little more toft soap, if necessary, in that quarter. After the tree has begun to exhibit signs of feeling the full pay you have given it - say twenty months hence - then you may, if needful, prune it moderately. When, indeed, the tree is partly decayed, or broken, or fall of tangled and cross limbs, I would be a little severe with it at first, bat not otherwise.

This is the season when a shrewd old digger should go over his peach and plum-trees, scrape away the earth about the bottom of the trunks, and look for that little rascal, the peach worm. If he is there, expecting.that "there is a good time coming," now that he is in such comfortable winter quarters, you will know it by the gum, by which the tree always shows to its natural protector the presence of its enemy. Wherever you see this gum, take your knife, open the bark, and take out the vile grub. If he stays there a few months longer, he will completely circumnavigate the trunk; and, after he has been round the world in this manner, there are no more peaches for you. It is a matter of five minutes to a tree; and, if you grudge that pains, for rareripes, the grub will take five months at it, and get the better of you.

If you are planting fruit trees, don't be so foolish as to set " tender trees," such as apricots, nectarines, and so forth, in warm, sunny places, on the south side of walls, fences, and gardens* Such are, depend on it, the very spots'to kill them - between the extra heat of mid-summer, and the constant freezing and thawings of the trunks in winter. You had better choose a west, or, if not too far northward, even a due northern exposure. The latter is much the best in the Middle States.

Never plant a tree with small roots and large top - when the roots have been made small by the spade in digging - without making the latter small also. There must be some ballast in the hold to carry so much sail on the mast, as an old salt would say; and you will gain in the health and size of the tree, three years hence, by shortening back the ends of the longest limbs till you have struck a fair balance between the part that collects food and the part that consumes it.

Yours, An old Digger.