180 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



For the first twelve or fifteen years they will require no 

 other cultivation than what they will get in common with the 

 crop that is grown among them. About this time they will 

 begin to bear, and the crop will annually increase with their 

 growth until they come to maturity, which they do when from 

 thirty-five to forty years of age. 



After you cease ploughing and planting your orchard, it 

 should be manured once in three years, at the rate of thirty 

 horse-loads of manure to the acre, spread broadcast, but not 

 very near to the trunks of the trees ; and once in three years 

 two bushels of ashes to the tree should be applied in the 

 same way ; and once in three years substitute twenty pounds 

 of crushed bone to the tree, and if you find it convenient to 

 mulch them in the fall, all the better. Turn in your breeding 

 sows about the first of May, and keep them in till the first 

 of September ; and if they do not keep the ground thoroughly 

 pulverized, you may conclude that you have not the right 

 breed. 



The above details, briefly given, constitute the modus oper- 

 andi by which handsome and salable apples can be raised 

 in Massachusetts, and as profitably raised as almost any other 

 crop. 



I am fully convinced that the prevailing prejudice existing 

 against orchards has grown out of the gross negligence of 

 those who have had them in charge. They have been treated 

 as a wood lot, and regarded as something that could take care 

 of itself, and was expected to yield a crop year after year as 

 though the soil contained an inexhaustible amount of material 

 of which fruit is made. 



One grave charge frequently brought against apple-trees 

 is, that they bear only every other year, and I once knew a 

 man to cut down a thrifty orchard, not because it did not 

 bear, but because it did not bear when fruit was very scarce. 



In 1850, I set a small orchard. I bought my trees of an 

 old gentleman who had kept a nursery for fifty years on laud 

 on which a part of the city of Fall River now stands. In 

 selecting my Baldwins, he asked me if I would have such as 

 would bear the odd years. Not exactlj^ comprehending him, 

 I told him that I would take such as would bear every year. 

 He replied, that "if you take them from this row, they will bear 



