HOW SOD AFFECTED AN APPLE ORCHARD. II.* 



F. H. HALL. 



Five years ago a bulletin of this Station, No. 



Tillage 314, announced that in the Auchter orchard, 



superior to typical of the great majority of commercial apple 



sod mulch. orchards of western New York, the tillage-and- 



cover-crop system of soil management was, in 



practically every way, superior to the sod-mulch system. Five 



additional crops have confirmed this conclusion and strengthened 



the belief that grass roots above apple-tree roots are detrimental 



to the health of the trees and a menace to good crops. 



Under exceptional circumstances, as in the Hitchings orchards, 

 discussed in Bulletin No. 375, deep soils well supplied with moisture 

 may grow both apples and grass successfully and to the financial 

 advantage of the orchardist; but such conditions are so uncommon 

 in commercial orcharding in the great New York apple-belt that 

 the only safe practice is to adopt the tillage-and-cover-crop system 

 unless careful study of all factors has proved sod-mulch better for 

 the particular combination of topographical, soil, labor and market 

 conditions in individual orchards. 



The Auchter orchard, in which the experiment 



Auchter here reported was located, is near Rochester, in 



orchard and the heart of the " apple belt " and was chosen 



its management, because it was uniform in soil and topography 



and quite typical of the apple orchards of western 



New York. The land is slightly rolling and is a fertile Dunkirk 



loam, about ten inches deep, underlaid by a sandy subsoil. The 



orchard includes nine and one-half acres, set to Baldwin apple trees, 



40 feet apart each way, which were 27 years old when the experiment 



began in 1903. About 120 trees were included in each half of the 



experiment. On the sections devoted to t'llage the land was plowed 



each spring and cultivated from four to seven times, after which 



Reprint of Popular Edition of Bulletin No. 383; for Bulletin, see p. 529. 



[933] 



