398 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
some strategies that when fully developed will some day thrust our enemy 
out of this goodly land of our inheritance. 
The first and strongest defense that we can make is by the use of a soil 
cover of some kind. We are told that “nature abhors a vacuum,” and it 
certainly seems true that both by washing out, by drying out, by killing out, 
nature puts in some pretty plain protests against a naked soil, either in 
summer or winter. And so we are inclined to put ourselves in line with this 
general law and keep our soil covered at all seasons as far as practicable. 
In the apple orchard this may be done both by means of a mulch and by 
cover crops of various kinds. We are inclined to think that a very thorough 
mulch should be maintained about the trees at all seasons of the year, and 
to hold this in place and encourage the snow to stay about the trees and 
reinforce the mulch, we favor a system of planting that will make it con- 
venient to grow raspberries along the orchard rows. The bushes will add 
somewhat to the income of the orchard, with but a small amount of care, 
and contribute and hold in place a large proportion of their own leaves and 
dead twigs, as well as those of the trees above them. As the trees become 
old and too large and shady for the berries we presume that there is nothing 
better than a cover of red clover, the crop to be cut and left on the ground 
and reinforced with a liberal dressing of coarse manure under the branches 
of the trees. 
In the nursery a cover crop is the only practical protection that can be 
given, and buckwheat and oats are the two crops most commonly used. 
Neither is perfectly satisfactory; buckwheat is not sufficiently leafy, and oats 
take too much moisture from the soil. We are thinking of trying a com- 
bination of the two, and have seriously in mind the trial of rape, sowed the 
latter part of July. This latter crop, if we had sufficient moisture to start 
the seed, would surely give a very warm leafy covering, but with plenty 
of snow it might live through the winter and be troublesome to get rid of 
in the spring. 
If Prof. Hanson’s recently recommended trial of the little Siberian bush 
crab as a stock for the apple proves all that may be hoped for it, we may not 
always be at the mercy of a winter drouth, as in our nurseries we surely are 
very largely at the present time. 
Root-killing among the small fruits is a very hard matter to provide 
against, and yet it is a very serious cause of loss to our berry growers. Here 
a cover crop is out of the question and a mulch would be too expensive and 
frequently of little avail. Perhaps all we can do is to see that the soil does 
not lack moisture, which is also out of the question unless we have pro- 
vided a system of irrigation. But we are of opinion that with plenty of 
moisture root injury would generally be avoided, and as in our average 
seasons systematic irrigation would add largely to the crop, and that, too, 
at the time the highest prices prevail, we think that the ability to secure a 
cheap and effective system of irrigation is the first thing that a berry grower 
should take into consideration in choosing a location for his business. 
Fortunately in the roots of the wild plum we have a stock upon which to 
graft the plum that is just about ironclad, and we think that the plum 
orchard is so much safer from insect enemies when the ground is free from 
litter that the only protection that we recommend is the dust blanket in 
summer and a well loosened soil for winter. If, however, the plum is grafted 
on the peach or some of the foreign stocks, it will need even more careful 
winter cover than the apple. 
