Care of Fruit Trees. 615 



more wheat per acre than they do in Dakota.^ Six to ten bushels of 

 wheat means that lots of land is left for the thistle; and to this 

 must be added raw prairie, and waste land upon farms which are 

 too big to be farmed ; and still to these encouragements to the plant 

 must be added the fault of wheat after wheat year by year. The 

 reports say that 25,000 square miles of land are threatened to be 

 made profitless for wheat by the Russian thistle. Then, upon so 

 much area the advent of a mixed and self-sustaining husbandry will 

 be hastened, aud the Russian thistle should have all the honor of 

 the achievement. The oncoming of the Canada thistle was pro- 

 claimed over a half century ago with the same forebodings of 

 disaster. One ISTew York agitator warned the people that it would 

 " establish its fatal empire over the whole of North America," and 

 perhaps result in the depopulation of the country ! But whilst the 

 Canada thistle has spread, it has met its Waterloo whenever it has 

 made an onslaught against a good farmer. It is no longer dreaded 

 by the farmers of this State. The land is now too precious to be 

 given over to thistles. Now and then one sees a place like Solomon 

 saw when he " went by the field of the slothful, and by the vine- 

 yard of the man void of understanding; and lo, it was all grown 

 over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the 

 stone wall thereof was broken down." 



REVIEW. 



I, Care of Fruit trees. — 



A. Sod-treatment of an orchard is a revival of the time when 

 •orchards were mere incidental accessories to the farm, and 

 when the destiny of the apple was the cider barrel. 



B. No one cause can be assigned for all the failures of orchards 



to bear. The cause may be different for each orchard, and 

 its determination, therefore, is a local question in each 

 instance. The experimenter can discover the various agencies 

 which may make orchards to be unproductive, but he may 

 not be able to ascertain which one, or which combination of 

 them, may affect any given orchard. 



C. The orchardist is to discover the cause of his failures, first, by 



acquiring a knowledge of the fundamental requirements of 

 fruit-trees, and, second, by carefully watching and studying 

 and experimenting with his own plantation. 



