120 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



is set on old sod or blue grass or red top, that will so completely 

 destroy that old tnrf sod and work it out, as poultry ; and they 

 won't destroy the trees. They eat the apples, they destroy the 

 insects, and they clean the land and put the ground under fallow 

 completely. I could call your attention to orchards of two or 

 three acres in extent, where two or three hundred hens have 

 been kept for a period of years, where there is nothing grow- 

 ing on that land but the apple trees, and those trees are grow- 

 ing as they are not growing under any stage of cultivation except 

 high actual manuring, as a result of this tillage given by the 



Yellow-edge or mourning-cloak butterfly. 



birds and the manure deposited there. My little orchard down 

 here, where I am growing six thousand chickens this year — 

 those little apple trees are growing so fast I am fearful for their 

 wintering from the very fact that the manure deposited on that 

 land is causing such a rapid growth there it is a question of stop- 

 ping their growth rather than carrying it forward, and it is a 

 question in these orchards that are intensely covered with chick- 

 ens and with hens, — it is a question of the growth of the fruit, 

 the quality of the fruit — fruit grows as fast as the trees grow. 



And now were I to engage in growing an apple orchard today, 

 I would select the land, if it were a forty acre farm, and I 

 would put my colony houses containing one hundred birds 

 around in that orchard, and would give a group of one hundred 

 a certain area of that orchard, one row here, another row in that 

 direction, and I would fill that orchard with hens and would put 



