No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGiaCULTURE. 497 



there continually arise discussions of easy ways and so-called 

 "nature's ways."* Many men believe that apple trees should not be 

 pruned because this is "nature's way/' But nature prunes and 

 prunes severely. The limbs fight it out among themselves. Gradu- 

 ally some limbes are killed and those that persist are injured by the 

 combat. 



Then another man says that nature's way is to have sod in the 

 orchard. Now the real natural way is to have the trees growing 

 close together, each one trying to crowd the other out, so that the 

 trees become like forest trees, with a bouquet of leaves at the top. 

 One noted advocate of the sod mulch method has an orchard on the 

 side of a hill. As the water sweeps down this hill it gives him an ex- 

 cess of moisture. He uses the grass to pump this excess of water 

 out, but many farmers, seeing this easy way advertised, take it up 

 wholly regardless of their soil conditions. 



A man in the South found that he could cut all the roots from a 

 tree before setting and get good results. Being an advertiser his 

 method became widely Ivuown and many men in the North adopted 

 it. ^Yhere he lives the spring comes on gradually, so that the tree 

 can become rooted and may be fairly successful, but with us we have 

 the ''burst of spring;" suddenly a great demand is made on the roots 

 and the tree thus treated generally fails to do as well. Practically 

 all Experiment Station tests have condemned the method. 



So we have many men of many minds as we are changing from old 

 conditions to the commercial orchard ideas. The man who origi- 

 nates the fad or who actively champions it is usually successful, be- 

 cause his pride causes him to treat his trees so well in all other 

 respects. Not infrequently his success is in spite of, rather than 

 because of, his fad. Many of these ideas are based on attempts to 

 get back to nature's way. While we need to understand nature, 

 yet it is largely in order to know how to improve her ways or to 

 avoid them. Nature grows fruit for the seeds; her purpose is to 

 produce apple seeds, and these with little pulp. But we want pulp 

 and as little core as possible. Her way is to grow a multitude of 

 small apples, while our desire is for a smaller number of large ones. 



TILLAGE OF APPLE ORCHARDS. 



In the summers of 1903 and 1904 Mr. Bues and I made an orchard 

 survey of Wayne and Orleans counties, New York. These are two 

 of the four lake counties in the noted apple region of Western New 

 York. Each county produces about 4,000,000 bushels of apples in a 

 year when there is a fair crop. Over 1,100 orchards were examined, 

 whose total area was nearly 9,000 acres. Each orchard was ex- 

 amined for diseases, insects, character of soil, drainage, varieties, 

 methods of pruning, tilling, fertilizing, spraying, etc., and the yields 

 were obtained. The effort was to study everything that had to do 

 with success in ajjple production. That is, to study the results of 

 seventy-five years of apple growing. 



When vou examine onlv one orchard vou can not tell M'hat is the 



». *' t' 



cause of success or failure, because there are so many factors that 

 enter into the question. By examining a large number and tabulat- 

 ing the results it becomes possible to determine the relative import- 



82—7—1906. 



