ORCHARDING ON THE WESTERN PRAIRIE. l8l 



tree so it will hold the moisture, and if it is on a side-hill you want 

 to bank it up on the lower side. So I would say, not only plant 

 deep but do not try to get all the dirt back into the hole. 



Mr. Leach : Would that work on clay subsoil ? I mean in a 

 season like this last. 



Mr. Underwood: If you had a heavy clay soil you would not 

 need to do it. Ninety per cent, of the orchards planted in this state 

 are in different soil from wdiat I have. I never happened to run on 

 to a heavy clay soil in planting an orchard. This location where Mr. 

 Smith planted his orchard was a rolling prairie and some was a 

 gravel knoll. I said I did not believe I would plant an orchard 

 there, but he wanted it there, and he knew better what he wanted 

 than I did. 



Prof. C. B. Waldron (S. D.) : We had an orchard three hun- 

 dred miles from here on very loose soil. They had grubbed out 

 some black oaks in order to make room for the apple trees, and that 

 gave us a hint as to the cause of root-killing, the soil was too com- 

 pact. Since that time we have mulched our apple orchard with two 

 or three inches of fine mulch. That is allowed to lie on the ground 

 until the first of June, wlien it is plowed under with a one horse 

 plow and is then cultivated until it freezes in the fall. By that time 

 another mulch is applied, and that is plowed under the following 

 spring about the first of June. We have not had any test winters 

 since 1897, but it seems to me if we can keep a loose layer of earth 

 five inches thick it will lessen the dangers of root-killing. This 

 orchard in the northern part of the state is ten or twelve years 

 old, and no trees were lost in 1898 and 1899. 



Mr. O. F. Brand : The suggestion of Mr. Cook that trees should 

 be planted from twelve to twenty-four inches deeper than they stood 

 in the nursery agrees with my experience. In 1876 I planted tw^o 

 or three hundred Duchess of Oldenburg, and I thought at the 

 time that deep planting was the proper thing, and some portion of 

 that hundred, some ninety-two trees, I planted fully a foot deeper 

 than thev stood in the nursery. I gradually thinned them out until 

 there are some thirty-three now standing. I also have another block 

 where there were originally 112 that were never transplanted, they 

 grew in a nursery row; also another block of thirty-five or forty 

 Duchess that are partly trees and partly root-grafts that had never 

 been disturbed. This one block that I planted deep have never 

 produced enough apples to pay for the use of the ground with the 

 exception of one year, when I got about' thirty bushels of third-class 

 apples which sold for twenty-five cents a bushel, and the 

 same year all of my other Duchess averaged about seven bushels to 

 the tree, and I realized over sixty cents net for them. Now this 

 block of deep planted apple trees are on just as good soil, not very 

 far distant from the others, — it is the same soil practically— and 

 for a good manv vears they had no shelter except on the west, where 

 it did no good. 'They would blossom full and set a full crop of 

 apples just as much as any of the others. They would carry those 

 apples until it began to get a little dry and then all the perfect ap- 

 ples would drop off from the tree. They were perfect apples. I 



