CULTIVATION OF THE COMMERCIAL ORCHARD. 167 



we find that we can put the soil into a very fine and powdery con- 

 dition, even after a severe rain. We have also used with good suc- 

 cess a common farm drag - . In fact, any implement that will pulver- 

 ize the soil to the depth of two or three inches is well adapted for 

 the commercial orchard, provided it is an arrangement that will not 

 injure the bodies of the trees. 



Mr. Richardson : In our section of the country either the farmer 

 is too busy, or there is something else ; we have no commercial or- 

 chards. Sometimes a man sells over $1,000 worth of apples, but he 

 does not cultivate. Two years ago Mr. Biddle was in our vicinity. 

 I took him out and showed him the orchard. I don't know when it 

 was cultivated. Mr. Biddle was very much astonished; he did not 

 think it was possible to grow such trees in Minnesota. 



Mr. E. G. E. Reel : Mr. Underwood brought up a point upon 

 which I w T ould like to have a little more information, and that is, in 

 regard to keeping the ground clean. The matter of humus comes 

 up, and I would like to know whether to provide humus we should 

 not have a catch crop. Prof. Green, I suppose, could tell us what 

 to use as a catch crop that would take the place of a fertilizer or 

 supply humus. 



Prof. Green : This matter of cultivation is an exceedingly in- 

 teresting one, and one that has many sides to it, because there are 

 so many conditions we must take into consideration. I attended a 

 meeting of the American Pomological Society, at Buffalo, in Sep- 

 tember, and there a man of wide experience said he did not believe 

 in cultivation for the orchard. Now, that seemed a strange kind of 

 a doctrine, and a half dozen pitched into him right away. He said 

 they never had a failure in Canada due to drouth. They did not 

 need to cultivate to save moisture. They have forty inches of rain- 

 fall where we have from eighteen to twenty-eight. When it comes 

 to cultivating in this section, you all know that when a piece of 

 land is just broken up, a piece of prairie sod or a piece of newly 

 cleared land, it does not wash when the timber is first taken off ; 

 but after four or five years' cultivation it will begin to wash, and 

 it will wash a good deal, and the longer you cultivate the more 

 it will wash, especially where there is a clean crop, and you can 

 leave nothing in the soil. In English agriculture they call grass 

 crops "ameliorating" crops, that is, improvement crops. They im- 

 prove the soil in this way, that they add humus to it. Humus is not 

 a food, but it has the power of absorbing gases and retaining mois- 

 ture to a wonderful degree, and it is that quality that makes your 

 soil friable, and it is to add that to the soil that we seed our land 

 down to grass every once in a while, for I believe in the clean culti- 

 vation of the soil for just the purpose that Mr. Underwood has so 

 nicely explained. I would say this, that there are some soils, and, I 

 think, most soils in this state, that will not stand cultivation year 

 after year without getting into a kind of mineral condition, and it is 

 a good plan to seed down once in a while to one of those amelior- 

 ating, or improvement, crops that will add humus to the soil. I 

 do not believe there are many soils in the state that can be kept in 



