Commercial Fruit Growing 



labourer's friend, but the grower's enemy. Hoe as soon as the weeds 

 appear; it is cheaper to hoe three times when hardly any weeds can be 

 seen than to wait till there is a tangled and matted carpet of growths 

 which have sucked enough from your soil to produce flowers and develop 

 their seeds. The more mouths there are to feed from the cupboard the 

 quicker its shelves become bare. (See Vol. I., p. 121.) 



While the operations for cleaning and preparing the land are going on 

 the grower will find employment during the evenings of his first winter 

 of occupation in studying 

 nurserymen's catalogues and 

 in gathering all the informa- 

 tion he can as to how to set 

 out his plantation, what dis- 

 tances to plant, and whether 

 to intercrop with bushes, or 

 with other crops, or not at all. 



He will have little diffi- 

 culty in deciding that while 

 he will plant in straight rows 

 each way, he will have the 

 widest spaces running north 

 and south, if the conforma- 

 tion of his land makes it at 

 all possible. 



He will take care not to 

 have his rows too long with- 

 out a break. As he hopes to 

 get fruit he will reflect that 

 such fruit must be carried out. 

 If the distances are too long, 

 too much of his own or his 

 gatherers' time will be taken 

 up in walking to and fro. He 

 will therefore arrange for a 



roadway whenever his rows approach to 300 yd. in length. It may be that 

 around the outskirts of the land he proposes to plant there is that feature 

 that gives peculiar beauty to an English landscape, and that in the breast 

 of the grower, frequently, causes a conflict between his aesthetic tastes 

 and his instincts as a cultivator hedgerow timber. If there is, it goes 

 without saying that there is a clause in his agreement binding him to 

 respect it as landlord's property. He will certainly try and arrange to 

 use the space immediately under it as a roadway, and will select to plant 

 near it some varieties retaining from their ancestors qualities that enable 

 them to accommodate themselves more or less to the conditions of hedge- 

 row existence, such as the Damson and the Bush Plum. 



He will have before him several methods of planting to choose from. 



Fig. 322. A Young Standard Apple Tree in Fruit 



