PEACHES. CULTIVATION. 205 



diminished, either in weight or measure, its size and 

 beauty were greatly improved, so that their fruit was the 

 handsomest in the Philadelphia market ; and during the 

 best of the season, much of it was sold at from $4.50 to 

 6 the basket, of three pecks in measure. Their trees are 

 usually transplanted when but of a single year's growth 

 from the bud ; they usually produce a full crop of fruit in 

 the fourth year after being transplanted, and from some 

 of their trees two bushels have been gathered in a pingle 

 year. They prefer a dry soil, light and friable, on a foun- 

 dation of clay, or gravelly clay, a good, but not a very rich 

 soil. Like all other good cultivators, the whole land is 

 always kept in cultivation. For the first two or three years, 

 corn is raised in the orchard, but afterwards the trees are 

 permitted to occupy the whole ground, nothing being suf- 

 fered to grow beneath their shade, as this would rob the 

 fruit of its nourishment. In Delaware, where the climate 

 is warm and the soil good, twenty feet asunder is the suit- 

 able distance recommended for the tree ; while on the 

 eastern or Atlantic side of New Jersey, sixteen or seven- 

 teen feet asunder is deemed sufficient by some of their 

 most experienced cultivators, on good soils ; while farther 

 north, or on poorer soils, a less distance will suffice. 



To render peach trees very productive, it has been rec- 

 ommended to shorten the new, young wood in July, by 

 cutting in a few inches ; and the shoots proceeding from 

 these are to be shortened again during the course of the 

 summer. This mode is favorable to the production of 

 fruit buds, and the trees will produce more abundant crops 

 the following year. This pruning or shortening may be 

 most profitably performed with very large shears, with long 

 handles, such as are used for clipping hedges; and I am 

 persuaded that, with such an instrument, a man might 

 prune a great many trees in a day. [See INTRODUCTION, 

 Section VIII. Subs. 4th.] Mr. Knight, however, recom- 

 mends to bend downwards the young and luxuriant shoots, 

 instead of clipping : they thus produce the finest possible 

 bearing wood for the second year. This last is the pref- 

 erable mode. [See INTRODUCTION, Section VIII. Subs. 3.] 

 With respect to trees trained to walls, Jean Pierre Sa- 

 vard, at Montreuil, according to Loudon, varies the posi- 

 tion of the branches every year, by elevating to a greater 

 angle the weak, depressing the strong, cutting out old, 

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