104 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



them perfectly straight. It will then be an easy matter to plant the trees 

 in straight rows. If the ground is properly prepared there will be no 

 occasion to dig a hole any larger than will be required to receive the roots. 

 The orchard should have careful cultivation after this. We use one horse 

 and plow the land early in the spring with a plow that can be adjusted 

 to turn either to or from the trees. Set the plow so as to run quite 

 shallow and so that it can be easily thrown out in passing a tree. Turn 

 the furrows toward every alternate row of trees and go through the entire 

 orchard, leaving a few furrows unfinished upon each land. Then set the 

 plow so that the horse will be away from the trees and finish the furrows 

 along the tree rows. By reversing this order the next year, turning the 

 soil from the rows where it was turned away from them this year, the 

 ground will be kept level. During the remainder of the season the land 

 is worked once a week with a spring-tooth harrow and a Planet Jr. By 

 lengthening the side arms so as to give room for one more tooth, a culti- 

 vator with nine teeth instead of seven will work a space of four feet wide. 

 Whenever the weeds get so large as to trouble, a Planet Jr. cultivator 

 with five scraper teeth about five inches wide was used. After each culti- 

 vation it is a good plan to go through the orchard with a sharp hoe and 

 cut off any weeds that may have been left and at the same time remove 

 any sprouts at the base of the trees. This cultivation should be kept up 

 until about the first of August, or later if tlie season is dry, and then sow 

 to oats or some other cover crop. A good horse will plow a five-acre 

 orchard in two days and will cultivate it in a little more than half a day, 

 and where the trees are so close there is less liability of injuring the trees 

 than when two horses and larger tools are used. 



Our present plum orchard is used as a hen park and as the hens will 

 clean out everything in the way of a cover crop around their headquar- 

 ters, we prevent this by dumping a load of rakings from the wheat or 

 oat stubble in piles near their house when the cover crop is sown, 

 and this keeps them busy until the crop is too large to be injured by them. 



Although we spray the trees several times with Bordeaux mixture and 

 Paris green, we generally find it advisable to jar the trees more or less 

 for curculio. We prefer to do the pruning in the fall or early spring, 

 cutting back the strong growing varieties severely and generally cutting 

 out the strongest limbs and leaving the smallest ones, although some 

 varieties require very little pruning. After the severe winter of 1899 

 the trees seemed badly injured, but where a large part of the top was 

 removed they seemed to recover much better than where left unpruned. 

 For feeding the trees we use stable manure, commercial fertilizers and 

 ashes, and find that high manuring is especially necessary for the Golden 

 Drop, which is inclined to drop badly if not well fed. No injury has been 

 done from using wood ashes even when applied in large quantities. For 

 shipping plums we consider the forty-pound, six-basket crate the best 

 package for large plums. One season when the best price we could secure 

 was 40c a bushel in bushel baskets we shipped them in forty-pound crates 

 and received $1.75 per crate. The smaller varieties sell best in the 16- 

 quart berry crate. 



There are few sections in Michigan where it will be safe to invest 

 very heavily in sweet cherries and the more profitable sour varieties are 

 none of them new. No class of fruit trees exceeds the cherry in the loss 

 in transferring from the nursery to the orchard. The safest way is to 



