Planting 



IN the spring of 1911, two men were driving past a neighbor's 

 farm in a northern state, and were talking about the neigh- 

 bor's new apple orchard, which contained five hundred 

 trees, one year old. "He will never make anything out of them," 

 said one man, "because one of the surest signs of what the 

 future of an orchard will be is how it was started, and this 

 one has been started wrongly in several ways. 



"In the first place, his trees are propagated from inferior 

 parents. Half of them he budded himself, because he thought 

 he could grow them cheaper than to buy them, and he got 



the buds from the old Baldwin trees on the place. Those 



trees never did bear right. The other half were bought from 

 a nurseryman that I know has little idea whether or not the 

 buds used came from trees that bear regularly and well. Then 

 he has set a solid block of the one kind. He has made other 

 mistakes in planting, but these two have already condemned 

 his efforts to failure." 



This incident of wrong practice so impressed itself on our 

 minds that we give it here. In the first place, you want trees 

 that are true to name, and that come from parents which bear 

 big crops of flawless fruit. We all know that no two trees in an 

 old orchard bear the same, even if they are of the same variety. 

 Some bear better than others. A bud will make a new tree 

 having the same characteristics as the tree from which the 

 bud was cut; so, right at the start, avoid one great limiter of 

 your success the poor trees and give yourself a chance to 

 succeed. Get trees that have been propagated from trees which 

 are bearing, and bearing as they should. If possible, make the 

 nurseryman tell you where his buds came from, and see these 

 parent trees if you can. 



It would seem almost foolish to tell an intelligent planter 

 to be sure that his trees are true to name, yet recently we were 

 in the packing-house of the president of a state horticultural 

 society, who is himself a large grower. He had many bushels 

 of very small, insipid peaches he was trying to get rid of. We 

 asked him what they were, and he replied that they grew on 

 trees he got as Crawford's Late, from a nursery nearby, taking 

 their word that the trees were right, even while he knew they 

 had not grown the trees themselves. 



There are a few reliable growers of fruit trees in this country, 

 and there are hundreds of irresponsible dealers, and growers 

 who produce trees as cheaply as possible. Some of the dealers 

 will buy a few thousand trees at wholesale from the unknown 

 and unreliable growers, whose only care is to deliver some- 

 thing with a few roots and a top, and who care little what kind 

 they supply, or what their trees will turn out to be, then "go 

 into the nursery business" and say they "grow" first-class 

 stock. The dealer cannot find out where his trees came from. 

 Orders for different varieties often are filled from the same 

 block of trees. These trees usually are offered cheaply, yet 



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