432 MISSOURI STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



white clover has been recommended. If it is better, when should it 

 be sown? With wheat or alone? etc. 



To this a correspondent replies through the Farmer: 



This question could be answered by the monosylable no ! but it 

 would seem from the last paragraph that some question has arisen in 

 this correspondent's vicinity, or among his friends somewhere, as to the 

 merits of the two clovers, red and white, for a hog pasture. Perhaps 

 the white clover advocate objects to red, because it checks the growth 

 of young trees, and the objection is a valid one while the orchard is 

 young — say for the first five years after setting, but when the orchard 

 begins to bear nothing is better for it than to seed it to June clover, 

 and pasture or feed the hogs there. If the orchard is kept well fertil- 

 ized for the first five years, and the ground well tilled with a hoed crop, 

 there can be no objection then to seeding to clover and let it remain. 

 June grass, and doubtless white clover, will, in time, come in gradually 

 as the clover gradually dies out, but hog pasturing will sustain the fer- 

 tility, and produce sufficient growth for an annual crop of fruit. 



A young orchard is frequently treated to a kind of savagry, to which 

 -most other farm productions would succumb. It is often planted in a 

 light soil, either natural or made so by constant tillage, and kept in a 

 crop, because most people think sowin,^ or planting must follow plow- 

 ing, and the farmer, in most neighborhoods, who would manure a young 

 orchard, and not grow a crop on the strength of it, would be considered 

 a crank in farming, or at least very improvident. 



If this correspondent's orchard has been treated to constant crop- 

 ping until the verge of sterility is reached, (we prefer to consider this 

 a supposable case,) then a very liberal dressing of the best barnyard 

 manure should be spread over the entire surface, after plowing shallow 

 in the spring, and thoroughly worked in with a cultivator or harrow, 

 along with spring rye one bushel to the acre, and clover seed at the rate 

 of a bushel to about eight acres. There would be in this supposable 

 case almost an absolute certainty of a catch of clover, and the orchard 

 would be started on a career of proflf to the owner, both as a pasture for 

 his swine, and for a purveyor to the family table. The trouble with half 

 the Michigan orchards to-day is that they are literally starving to death. 

 Planted on light soil, they have been kept in cultivation until the crops 

 ceased to be profitable and the trees have ceased to grow. The sur- 

 face roots have been kept feeding in the subsoil because the annual 

 plowing has shaved off" the surface feeders and compelled them to go 

 deep or die. The farmer who says his orchard has ceased to bear 

 and is unprofitable, ought to be hauled up to the confessional, and his 

 sin exposed. He has kept sucking at his one orange under the delusion 



