32 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
intact, and that it should be reset without any unnecessary delay, 
with the roots very little deeper in the ground than they were where 
it originally grew. A reason offered against deep planting was that 
the upper soil or mould was always richer than the next soil or 
mould below, that the trees would start to grow sooner, make a 
sturdier growth and bear fruit earlier, and from the nourishment 
received from the surface soil they would acquire a better root sys- 
tem and corresponding tops and produce more and larger fruit ofa 
richer and better quality. Here in the cold, dry Northwest a “new 
idea” that the true road to success lies in deep planting has so many 
advocates that the people are beginning to follow them blindly, 
some digging holes and shoving the roots down from one to two 
feet below the surface. Among the pleas made in favor of deep 
planting are protection of the roots against drouth and winter-kill- 
ing and holding the trees in a more upright position, but for 
neither of these is it any remedy, but rather the reverse. 
The disadvantages or objections to deep planting are, first, the 
roots are placed below where the surrounding subsoil has been 
broken and put in condition to properly feed the tree through the 
roots, and the tree is starved to death or receives barely nourishment 
enough to sustain life, until, by a forced effort, it can throw out sus- 
taining roots near the snrface where nature designed them to be, or 
until the roots curve upwards in their growth and get into surface 
soil. Second, it is not as sure a protection against drouth as shal- 
lower planting with proper mulching or frequent, thorough culti- 
vation, for the reason that our drouths are solong and intense that 
the earth becomes dead dry below where any of the roots reach and, 
consequently, the first rains that break the drouth do not carry 
moisture down to the roots for weeks afterward. Third, that deep 
planting was not a remedy against winter killing was proved by 
the great disaster that overtook us in 1872 and 1873. That winter 
followed a dry fall, with only two or three inches of moisture at 
the surface, and seven feet dry as dust below, when the ground 
froze up solid. In that winter thousands of trees were lost by root 
killing; only those escaped that had their roots in the moist surface 
soil. I lost about two acres of bearing orchard that was growing 
ona little hill, where by plowing the soil had been raised in the rows 
over the roots from eight to ten inches deep, excepting a few 
trees which I had made a broad level place by moving the ridge 
of earth to the lower side to level up. In my vineyard every root of 
my grape vines from below four inches of the surface was killed, 
and such of the vines as were covered before the little surface mois- 
ture came were killed out entirely. From that time I have never 
applied winter covering on a dead dry surface. 
In the winter of 1890 and 1891 I had another lesson in my experiment 
nursery. One-half of the trees were crown-grafts and set with only 
one bud of the scion below the surface. The remainder were 
put upon a lower portion of the seedling root and planted 
deep, and the early snow melted away and made the surface soil 
quite wet. We lost scarcely a crown-graft, but a considerable 
portion of the others were killed to the point of union of root and 
graft growth. 
