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WISCONSIN SUMMER MEETING, 1895. 219 
more severe and trying inthis section of the country. Third. For 
the protection of our stockyards and grounds, that the life of both 
man and beast may be made more comfortable and profitable. 
To serve the first named purpose, we should partially enclose our 
orchards, gardens and grounds, particularly on the west and north- 
west, with an almost solid body of sturdy evergreens. If planted 
thickly, say five or six feet apart, this belt, or screen, will not attain 
great height, which is not necessary ordesirable. Fifteen to twenty 
feet in height answers the purpose admirably. By leaving this en- 
closure open on the south and a portion of the east and north, a free 
circulation of air is assured. Our most trying winds and storms of 
winter, coming as they do from the west, southwest and northwest, 
would be much modified by this protecting belt of evergreens. No 
doubt, you have all observed the effect of sucha shelter belt. Itis 
not at all like a high board fence ora wall, which the wind sweeps 
over and drops down, and on again, and if it chances to be a driving 
snow storm leaves a huge drift to mark its impeded course; but 
when this driving snow storm enters the living wall of green, it 
seems to be chopped up fine by the millions of needles of the coni- 
fers, and the snow sifts down on the inside gently and evenly as 
though there were no driving storm outside. In this way an even 
distribution of nature’s great protecting blanket, snow, is secured 
for our plants and shrubs within. 
The second reason for the general planting of evergreens for shel- 
ter in point of utility is that they are conservators of moisture. This 
has been made very plain to me in the last two or three years in my 
evergreen nursery, and I can best illustrate my point by giving 
some ot my own experience and observation. Among my blocks of 
evergreens from which we dig and ship each season, tracts of land 
are annually vacated which,in the order of rotation observed, we 
plant to ordinary farm crops or to small fruits which we wish 
for plants or fruit. Whatever I have planted in these narrow vacated 
plats has thriven remarkably well and has formed full, heavy crops, 
notwithstanding the severity of the drouths of the last two seasons, 
Last season, for instance, our crops of strawberries on these small 
plats were the largest we have ever had; while other patches on 
lands quite similar in character, where the evergreens were lacking, 
were badly dried up and produced little, if anything. I can only ac- 
count for it by the presence of protecting bodies of evergreens. I 
would say here that we have no large evergreens in these fields, 
nothing as a rule over four or five feet high, and most of them much 
smaller, but as the growth is solid and close to the ground, those 
drying winds could not lick up the moisture and carry it away. 
Now, a single row of large, wide-spreading evergreens will do 
much to retain moisture and protect lands to leeward from the 
sweep of the drying winds. I firmly believe that it would pay the 
fruit grower to plant rows of evergreens north and south at dis- 
tances of, say, thirty rods apart, with the trees six feet apart in the 
row. They are not grass feeders and do not exhaust the adjacent 
lands as do the Lombardys, for instance. 
The third point named in way of utility is the protection afforded 
