Winter Meeting. Ill 



'■^ 



to sell his apples and we enquire the condition of his apples and if he 

 has cultivated it and so on, and he says, thoroughly, and we go and 

 -examine it and what do we find? We find that he has turned it with a 

 turning plow in the spring, and we find that is what he calls cultivation, 

 and I believe more people are in error on this point than any other one. 

 They don't really comprehend what is meant by cultivation. 



If I was going to explain it myself, I would say thorough culti- 

 vation. The best orchard we packed this year was one that was thor- 

 oughly cultivated, and is nearly always cultivated with shallow culti- 

 vation ; that is with cultivators or disc harrows or something of that 

 kind. I agree with Mrs. Flournoy in her paper, on deep cultivation, 

 if we run up against a season like this, in the middle of the row. Mr. 

 ^Vellhouse agrees with that proposition because he gave you the key 

 note w^hen he said that these minerals w^ere brought up by the evapora- 

 tion of moisture from below. This brings us to the comprehension of 

 "the fact, that everything we can do to husband moisture we ought to 

 •<lo, if we expect to succeed, and I am quite proud of the facts that have 

 been brought out by tljose who have read the papers and discussed them 

 on this line, because to my mind this is the key note to success. 



Professor Smith, of Chillicothe. — I want to know how to cultivate. 

 I want to know whether to cultivate the orchard with a disc cultivator, 

 •or to cultivate it only with a disc harrow, or whether to plow it up 

 with a breaking plow. I will tell you what I did last year. I had 

 ■sixty acres in one orchard and we plowed it diagonally a year ago; 

 Ave had been plowing it north and south, and east and west and con- 

 cluded to plow it diagonally. We planted 20 acres of that in corn last 

 Tear. The next to that we sowed in sorghum and the next lay idle. 

 The part that was idle was broken up last fall again. The part that 

 was in corn was not broken up. Now we put in a two horse cultivator 

 •on the part that had been in weeds and also on the part that had been 

 in sorghum and a little in the corn — very little. I find this year in market- 

 ing the apples, that the apples were fifty per cent, better where we had 

 broken it up in the fall and disced it with a disc harrow in the spring 

 and plowed it all summer with the cultivator ; fifty per cent, better than 

 anything I had except where I had it well cultivated with a cultivator 

 all last summer and raised a little corn, although not very much corn; 

 but the part of the field, and that diagonally through it and exactly the 

 same conditions, the same planting "and with the same mode of culti- 

 . vation otherwise — where it was not broken with that breaking plow — 

 was not as good as the other by fifty per cent. Then we had another 

 piece where it was right on top of a hill, where it had been turned to the 

 trees too much, and a man w^ent last March and this spring and turned 

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