SECRETARY'S PORTFOLIO. 337 



What magic had produced this beautiful sight? That was precisely what I 

 went up to learn, to see and to know. Good drained soil, girdling, lime, salt and 

 an army-corps of 500 young turkeys, perpetually on the march in their different 

 battalions, and the warbling light-armed troops skipping and singing among 

 the branches there tell the whole story ; they were at once cause and guard of 

 all, through all these, the united head, heart and brain of the family selected, 

 created and controlled, the proprietor's brain by common consent ever being 

 the leading element. 



It was the girdling in which I was most interested, for sixty years ago, on 

 my father's farm in Massachusetts, I girdled fruit trees in the same way, and 

 I have done it occasionally to truant trees and vines ever since. So when I 

 read in Downing's most admirable book that girdling endangered the life and 

 health of the tree I knew that there great Homer napped for a moment, and 

 only repeated what others had told him, a mere hereditary dogma, for in sixty 

 years I never knew a branch or a tree killed or injured by it. My recent way 

 of doing it is to take a wide-set saw and saw a circle carefully clean down to the 

 wood all round the trunk of the tree. Mr. Spaulding takes out from a quarter 

 to half an inch in June with a knife, which takes longer, and I think is no 

 better if as good. 



I have pear trees and apple trees now, so girdled a year ago, on my place, 

 loaded with fruit, which never bore a peck before, though some of them were 

 ten or twelve inches through. But friend Spaulding has literally thousands 

 of young trees not ten feet high, with all the branches bending down with the 

 finest fruit I have ever seen, for among his 14,000 trees he girdled 3,000 last 

 year. His experiment is a thorough demonstration beyond all doubt, for in 

 some cases whole rows are girdled, and whole rows skipped ; in other cases only 

 every other tree in each row is taken of the same sort of apple planted at the 

 same time. In every case the young girdled trees are loaded with the finest 

 fruit, while the ungirdled ones in the same row or adjoining rows have none on 

 them. 



But will not trees so treated bear themselves to death? Certainly they will 

 if not sustained ; when they have worked up into good fruit, all the fruit food 

 there is in the soil, be it more or less, they of course can do no more, unless 

 new fruit food is supplied. Hence a young orchard should never be set out where 

 an old one has been. But the man who sets the trees may as well use up that 

 amount of fruit food which is in the soil while he is alive and can eat the fruit 

 perhaps, as to set out the tree and leave it to his grandchildren to eat the fruit. 

 I now have a girdled Lawrence and one Winter Nelis pear full of fruit, which I 

 have no reason to think would have borne a dozen pears in ten years if they 

 had not been girdled, and one Green Pippin apple a foot through, full of fruit, 

 that has not before borne a peck in ten years of equally sound fruit. Besides an 

 apple tree thirty or forty years old, away up in the air, seldom bears any fruit 

 worth gathering, and it costs twice as much at least to gather it as it does from 

 low, young trees, and if our apple trees can be made to bear four times the fruit 

 in ten years what is the use in spreading it over forty years? Why not take it 

 as quick as we can get it, and reinvigorate the soil or set out a new orchard and 

 cut down the old one? 



At all events I have come home in the full belief that this process, new in 

 some sense but really older than I am, is destined to work a revolution in fruit- 

 growing, particularly in the west, and I shall let my saw run without fear like 

 a fiddler's bow to the new tune of the times, around my trees next spring, in 



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