Summer Meeting, 115 



ones which soonest suffer under unwise treatment. The land i.-; 

 kept under high culture, and is therefore deeply pulverized. There 

 is practically no herbage on the soil to protect it during the winter. 

 The soil, deeply broken and robbed of its humus, runs together and 

 cements itself, and it then requires "rest" in clover or other herb- 

 age crop to bring it back into its rightful condition. This resting 

 period allows nature to replace the fiber in the soil and to make 

 it once more so porous and mellow that plants can find a congenial 

 roothold in it. 



Having considered briefly the soil and its treatment, we pass 

 to the methods of propagation commonly used in growing the best 

 nursery trees. There has been a most controversial discussion of 

 the relative merits of root-grafted and budded fruits for many 

 years. For the most part this discussion has been unprofitable, 

 for there has been little earnest effort made to arrive at any ex- 

 act method of comparison. The disputers have too often dealt in 

 generalized statements, and it must be said that prejudice and the 

 desire to advocate the particular stock which one is growing are 

 not unknown to these discussions. Some experiments have been 

 tried for the purpose of determining the relative merits of the 

 two methods of propagation, but none of the experimenters seem 

 to have really analyzed the subject or to have arrived at any 

 definite conclusion. 



Before proceeding to a discussion of the comparative effects 

 of budding and root-grafting, it is essential that certain definitions 

 be fixed in the mind. The budding of fruit stocks in the nursery is 

 performed in the summer time upon stocks which were set in the 

 spring. These stocks are trimmed or "dressed" before they are 

 set in the nursery. Root-grafting is the setting of a scion upon a 

 root. This operation is performed during the winter, and the 

 grafts packed in moss fiber and stored away in a well ventilated 

 cellar to remain there until spring. If the entire root is used, the 

 operation might properly be called whole-root grafting. But inas- 

 much as the common method of planting grafts and stocks for bud- 

 ding is performed with a tool about eight or nine inches in length, 

 it would not be practical to undertake to plant the entire roots of 

 No. 1 straight apple stocks, many of which are twelve to fourteen 

 inches long, with a tool only eight inches long. Therefore, this 

 method of whole-root grafting, which has been talked so much 

 about for the past eighteen years, to the writer's personal knowl- 

 edge as a practical propagator, is purely a business proposition, 

 and is calculated to deceive. 



