238 CALIFORNIA FRUITS: HOW TO GROW THEM 



has been used to some extent, but experience generally does not favor 

 any plum stock for the peach and our largest propagators have 

 abandoned its use. 



The so-called "peach-almond" has often been urged as a stock for 

 the peach but has been little used, probably because the straight peach 

 and straight almond are so satisfactory and available. It is a fruit 

 having the pit of a peach but the pericarp of an almond, that is tough 

 and tasteless and disposed to split like an almond hull. Early in the 

 fifties a chance hybrid of this sort appeared in the nursery, of W. B. 

 West, of Stockton, and its pits were used for nursery seedlings which, 

 when budded to the peach, produced good trees. Trees bearing the 

 peach-almond are found here and there over the State. Mr. Burbank 

 has produced a hybrid of the Wager peach and the Languedoc almond. 



Distance in Orchard. Distance observed in planting peach 

 orchards differs greatly, according to the views of different growers. 

 Regarding the peach as a catch crop to plant between apricot, pear, 

 cherry, walnut, fig or other slower-growing, larger trees, the trees 

 may be set comparatively close; that is, with the latter trees at thirty 

 to forty feet, and alternate rows of peach planted quincunx, and to be 

 removed at the end of ten to fifteen years. If the peach is to have the 

 ground to itself, some planters plant at eighteen feet in equilateral 

 triangles, or twenty to twenty-four feet on the squares, the present 

 tendency of the peach, as with other trees, being to give more room 

 than was the custom a few years ago. 



Age of Trees. In planting peach orchards yearling trees are 

 generally preferred, though June buds are freely used and more are 

 planted in dormant bud than of any other kind of fruit trees. The 

 reason for this is easily found in the disposition of the peach to make 

 a tree the first year from the bud. It springs almost at once into a 

 full outfit of laterals. Some growers employ this disposition to form 

 a head the first year in the nursery. When the bud has grown out 

 eighteen inches, pinch it off at the top and force out laterals, which 

 make long growth the same season. When planted out in orchard the 

 following winter, cut back to ten or twelve inches. In this any one can 

 get a yearling with' the equivalent of a two-year-old head on it. The 

 common practice is, however, to let the growth from the bud proceed 

 as it chooses, and when the yearling is set in orchard, cut back to a 

 single bud the laterals which are desired to form the head and remov- 

 ing others. If there is a dormant bud on the stem where a branch is 

 desired and it is obstinate in not starting, a cross-cut through the 

 bark just above it may concentrate pressure and force it out. Proper 

 starting of the young tree is promoted by cutting away cleanly all 

 laterals which have grown from stem-buds. In such cutting back the 

 dormant buds at the base of such a lateral should be preserved. The 

 development of form from a yearling branched in the nursery is illus- 

 trated in chapter on pruning. 



Planting Dormant Buds. The chapter on planting describes 

 the planting of yearling trees. The lifting of dormant buds from the 

 home nursery and planting in orchard is described by P. W. Butler, of 

 Placer County, as follows : 



