lo June, 1910.] Orchard and Garden Notes. 405: 



ORCHARD AND GARDEN NOTES. 



E. E. Pcscott, Trinci-pal, School of Horticulture, Burnley. 



Tlie Orchard. 



Planting 



The long delayed rains having come early in May, all ploughing will 

 now be completed. June is the month usually favoured, for the planting 

 of all deciduous orchard trees, and this work should now be carried 

 out. The ground should have been previously ploughed, subsoiled and 

 drained, in anticipation of the planting of the young trees. The yotung 

 trees should be planted to the same depth as they were growing in the 

 nursery beds ; and the holes for their reception should not be any deeper 

 than is necessary to contain the roots. A deeper hole only provides soak- 

 age .room for the soil moisture, and the hair roots are rotted as soon as 

 they are formed. In order to keep the tree holes at an even depth, a 

 plough furrow may be run along the whole length of the row j and each 

 tree coiuld then be planted to the depth of the furrow, and no deeper. 

 By this means, any soil moisture, or an excess of moisture, is evenly dis- 

 tributed, and is not likely to settle around the growing roots. 



Before planting, the roots of the young tree should be well pruned, 

 cutting them hard back, leaving a very small root system ; generally only 

 about one-third of the original roots being left. 



It is rarely necessary to manure newly planted trees when they are 

 being planted. If manure is required, it should either have been well 

 worked through the soil previously, or else it should be used as a surface 

 mulch some considerable time after planting. 



As soon as the soil ha.s settled firmly around the newly planted tree, 

 it is the general practice to cut the top hard back to two or three buds, so 

 as to restore the balance between the roots and the top. This method is 

 being criticised by a number of Ii^nglish fruitgrowers, who claim as a 

 result of some years experimenting, that more \igorous trees may be pro- 

 duced by allowing the tops to remain unpruned until a year after planting. 

 The first theory is that the elaborated sap may be working and dis- 

 tributing into the buds after the foliage has fallen, and to cut off any 

 portion of the tree containing the elaborated sap, is to disturb the work 

 of distribution. The pertinent questions asked are, "Why prune the shoots 

 to restore the balance ?"" " Would it not be better for the tree to restore 

 its own balance?" It is claimed that the tree will do this more effectively 

 if all the shoots are left unpruned for the first season ; as the tree will give 

 a greater number of leaves, and leaf sap earlier in the season. Thus a 

 greater amount of sap elaboration takes place, and more roots and a more 

 vigorous tree are the result. In the experiments a number of plum stocks 

 were planted, some being left uncut, the others being pruned. After- 

 wards, average trees were selected from each class . the pruned tree carried 

 240 leaves, and the unpruned tree had 792 leaves. The growths of the 

 trees under review during the second year showed that the trees pruned 

 the year after planting were far superior to the earlier pruned trees. 

 This is a matter for local experiments, and the results should prove very 

 interesting and valuable to the experimenter. 



Varieties. 

 In planting, growers will do well to study such varieties as are valuable 

 as export fruit, in apples and pears ; and other classes are generally 



