STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 59 



means is provided for maintaining the supply. Soils that are 

 lacking in vegetable matter are burned out and dead. They are 

 inactive. They hold a small amount of water, and they lose that 

 quickly. I desire therefore to impress upon you the need of 

 supplying vegetable matter to your orchard lands, and that brings 

 us to a discussion of the subject of orchard cover crops. A cover 

 crop, as the term is understood in horticultural language, is one 

 that is sown in the orchard after the trees have made their annual 

 growth and is allowed to remain there until the land is plowed 

 the following spring. The cover crop has several distinct offices 

 to perform besides supplying vegetable matter to the soil, and to 

 these functions I desire briefly to refer. The cover crop idea for 

 orchards is distinctly a modern one and has grown up since the 

 intensive cultivation of orchards has come into prominence. 



The most expensive and the most illusive element of plant food 

 is nitrogen. In the condition in which plants use it it melts away 

 like sugar or salt. Growing plants take it up and use it in their 

 growth, and on soils that are barren of plant life, the nitrogen is 

 lost in drainage water. The greatest loss of nitrogen occurs 

 through the fall and winter months, and a distinct function of the 

 cover crop is to take up the available nitrogen at that period of 

 the year, and to hold it for the future use of the orchard. The 

 cover crop also takes up other available plant food during the fall 

 and thereby assists in checking the growth of the fruit trees which 

 harden down or ripen their fruit buds more satisfactorily. This 

 latter point is one that cannot be too strongly emphasized in the 

 -colder fruit growing sections of the country. 



The cover crop keeps the soil open so that the fall and winter 

 rains, instead of running off into the streams, sink slowly into the 

 ground, and, by its mechanical action, it prevents the washing 

 and compacting of the soil. 



If the cover crop is one that lives over winter it pumps out the 

 water of the soil in the spring sometimes hastening the period 

 when the land can be plowed from one to two weeks. I desire to 

 emphasize this water exhausting power of the cover crop in the 

 early spring, for sometimes when the succeeding months are dry, 

 the early growth of the cover crop may have wrought a serious 

 injury to the future orchard crop. Have seen both corn and 

 tomatoes that were a partial failure after following a heavy 

 :growth of crimson clover that had pumped out tons of water in 



