STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 67 



President of the United States on the Prohibition ticket some 

 years ago, a grand good man and a fine farmer. He has a farm 

 of 40,000 acres. Besides fruit he grows a good deal of wheat 

 and the fields are plowed with eight gang plows which turn over 

 hundreds of acres daily. This is seeded to wheat and hurriedly 

 harrowed in with broad, sweeping harrows that cover twenty- 

 two feet every time across the field. Business is done on a very 

 extensive scale. Right adjoining his farm there is a widow who 

 has a farm of 500 acres, land practically identical with that of 

 Gen. Bidwell, but as she has not the money or the machinery, 

 this land is thoroughly well plowed with a two-mule team and 

 a modern steel plow, and after lying fallow a couple of months 

 is again cross plowed and then thoroughly pulverized over and 

 over again with cut away harrows, after which the seed is applied 

 and it is thoroughly worked into the soil, which in this way is 

 far better tilled and prepared than the adjoining land of Mr. 

 Bidwell. The result is that year after year, while Gen. Bidwell's 

 yield is about fifteen bushels of wheat per acre, that of the widow 

 is from thirty-three to thirty-five bushels, more than doubling 

 the crop simply by tillage alone. 



Everything depends on culture. Every year the public is 

 demanding better things, finer berries, larger and more beautiful 

 plums and pears and peaches and apples. The only way to bring 

 them to their most perfect development is through thorough and 

 frequent tillage of the soil, which keeps the trees steadily growing 

 all the time by furnishing the necessary amount of moisture and 

 by freeing what plant food there is in the soil by constantly 

 bringing new particles of earth in contact with one another. 



I was down in northeastern Massachusetts two or three years 

 ago, talking to an institute there, and one man there said he had 

 recently planted out a hundred peach trees to please his wife, but 

 as he hadn't much faith in their ever bearing peaches he had seeded 

 the land down to grass so he would be sure to have one crop any 

 way. Surely such an orchard as that has "gone to grass" at the 

 start. Coming up on the train today, all the way from Boston I 

 haven't seen a cultivated apple orchard, and I suppose that more 

 than 90% of the orchards in your state are in sod. You get many 

 and fine apples in this way, but you could get more and better 

 ones and more frequent annual crops, by thorough cultivation. 



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