THIRTY-SEVENTH ANNUAL REPORT. 15 



available orchard lands in the east, were old apple orchards in my boyhood 

 dayS; and I have helped remove those apple orchards and replanted the 

 same land immediately, or within a year or two, with peaches and pears 

 and plums and apples, and the only serious difficulty that I have found are 

 that there is some root rot that may disease your young trees when you first 

 plant them, and there is always some slight danger of aphis. I have been 

 ^'skeery" of the yellows. I know the secretary shakes his head; and you 

 people up here in Michigan think you can plant right over again where a 

 case of yellows has come out; but I have always been a little skeery of it, 

 and I have had good reason to be. Upon the whole, taking all our fruits 

 together, I have planted a good many acres — perhaps a hundred or more — 

 where there have been various orchards taken out, and I have had my 

 troubles; but, with the exception of yellows, I have not found it impossible 

 to make a good orchard, and usually a better one than the old one. I would 

 not want to put my best friend right back into a bed where we had taken out 

 a dead smallpox patient; but I believe the room and the bed and everything 

 can be so purified that that bed is healthful to sleep in again; but I think 

 it wants care and caution, and every known remedy to be applied that will 

 make healthy conditions. So about lands. Where we have had old trees 

 or diseased trees or trees taken out from any cause, I would want to aerate 

 that land; I would like to plough it two or three times, at every season I 

 could; and I would subsoil it, if it is land that can be subsoiled; and I would 

 want to add some organic matter to it by ploughing under of green crops 

 and leavening up the land. If the land is fit to open up in winter so you can 

 plough in winter, in February or early March, if I can get on there and turn 

 it up again — I am a great believer in frequent turning of the land and purify- 

 ing the roots by freezing; and it seems to me a purifying of the land is one 

 of the essentials. One of my best peach orchards in Connecticut was upon 

 a hilltop where we had had an apple orchard; nobody knows how old the 

 apple orchard was. They were vigorous trees, but they had got away up 

 yonder; they were trees too high to be handled economically according to 

 modern methods, and they were of mixed and uncertain varieties. Those 

 trees were taken out root and branch one fall. The land was ploughed 

 and subsoiled thoroughly that fall, and it was again ploughed in spring. 

 In midsummer it was ploughed again and sowed with cow peas. I perhaps 

 was one of the very first men in the north to grow the southern cow pea. 

 That was more than twenty-five years ago, and a heavy coating of cow 

 peas were grown there. After the frost had killed them in the fall, the land 

 was ploughed and seeded to rye; and in the spring when the rye was a foot 

 or more high it was turned under again and the land sowed to clover, a 

 good crop of clover grown, and ploughed under in the spring; and then, 

 with a good application of chemical fertilizers, that land was planted to 

 peaches; and I never had a more vigorous or healthy growth of trees; and 

 it is just going out now at 18 and 19 years of age, and has been a healthful 

 profitable orchard. But that was one kind of fruit following another. On 

 another strip of land near by, where there had been an old peach orchard, 

 and some native seedling trees; some eight or ten acres of those peaches 

 interplanted with the apples : They were all taken out and the land treated 

 much in the same way as the former old apple orchard, except there were 

 two crops of clover instead of one, and no cow peas, and I have built up a 

 most successful orchard there. Whether it is in spite of there having been 

 a previous crop of orchard trees, or on account of better preparation, I 

 don't know. 



