204 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



A person who has good trees needs but a few, and can well afford the 

 little time required in their care. The labor on each tree, if protected for 

 winter according to my plan, will not exceed five cents a year for five 

 years. After that a trough or two boards set up on the south-west side, 

 will protect the trunk from the sun in winter and spring, till the tops get 

 large enough for protection. The trunk should be from three and one- 

 half feet to five feet high. Cut back the top on the north and north-east 

 side to throw the growth to the south-west. Cut out all inside limbs not 

 wanted, about the last of March or last of June. Cut close to the tree 

 and cover wound with wax or mineral paint. After five years of good care 

 seed down to clover, and make a hog pasture of it, or cultivate with hoed 

 crops. If pastured with hogs, take in a much larger field than the orch- 

 ard for them to run in. If the orchard is pastured, the whole surface 

 should be manured every other year after the ground freezes. Don't ex- 

 pect ten to twenty bushels of apples from a tree every year without feed- 

 ing the land well. Distance apart — twenty to twenty-five feet apart will 

 be found plenty close when trees get old. If planted on the quincunx 

 plan with rows twenty-one feet apart, about one hundred trees can be set 

 on an acre and the trees will stand about twenty-one by twenty-four feet 

 apart. Don't plant a small apple tree within forty feet of a timber tree, 

 nor nearer than twenty-five feet to another apple tree; it had better be 

 thirty feet away. The apple tree that bears the most fruit of any tree I 

 know of stands more than fifty feet from any other tree. Forty years res- 

 idence in the northwest has taught me that these ideas faithfully carried 

 out will yearly be worth millions of dollars to the people of Minnesota. 

 The bark of trees must be kept good and free from wounds, and the bodies 

 must be kept healthy. 



The advantages of boxing trees up with earth during their first five 

 years in the orchard, as has been shown, are many. One advantage, not 

 heretofore mentioned, of this plan is that it permits pruning the tree to 

 suit the taste of the owner and having the wound heal perfectly without 

 leaving a dead spot on the tree. The top can easily be thrown to the 

 south and southwest, where it is most useful, as the top will go in the 

 direction of the greatest flow of sap. The inherent tendency of the apple 

 tree is to make a bushy top with no central stem above a certain point, 

 therefore with a healthy trunk the position of this bushy top is entirely 

 under the control of man, and can not only be made to shade the ground 

 on the south side of the tree, thereby preventing the escape of moisture 

 by action of the sun, but can also be made to shade the trunk and the 

 forks of the tree from sun scald. We need not trouble ourselves about 

 sun scald in old trees that have been kept healthy while young. They 

 will not sun scald. Another advantage in boxing is to enable the tree to 

 form a plentiful supply of large, vigorous leaves early in the season, 

 which will enable it to make an unusually long and healthy growth, a 

 growth which we cannot get from a young tree when the ends of the 

 limbs are killed or partly killed, and the trunk so exhausted by alternate 

 freezing and thawing that the tree is very much in the condition of a calf 

 wintered on the invigorating sustenance to be drawn from a straw stack, 

 surrounded by that too common barn yard windbreak — a barbed wire 

 fence. We all know that that kind of a calf never becomes the prize ox or 

 the premium butter cow. This early, vigorous growth is essential, as I 



