FRUIT-GROWING FOR PROFITLABOURERS AND FRUIT. 757 



these fruit of a quality suitable for home consumption and for sale has been grown from 

 time immemorial. Yet these gardens are often cumbered with old worn-out trees, and 

 produce inferior fruit scarcely worth carriage to market. This state of things is unfortu- 

 nately the rule rather than the exception, and demands a remedy. In some instances this 

 can be effected by judicious pruning, thinning, and cleansing the branches of varieties 

 worth retaining, by dusting them while damp with quicklime, also scraping the stems, 

 but not into the live bark, and coating them with a mixture of quicklime and soot formed 

 into a wash ; also extracting and burning perennial weeds with the prunings, spreading 

 the ashes beneath the fruit trees; supplying solid manures, if obtainable, otherwise a 

 mixture of bone meal and kainit in equal parts, 3| pounds per rod, in the autumn after the 

 trees have been trimmed, pointing in lightly, and supplementing in the spring, when the 

 buds unfold, with powdered nitrate of soda, 2 pounds per rod. If the varieties are not 

 good, and the trees have healthy stems, the remedy is grafting with better kinds in the 

 spring. This may be carried out so as not to interfere materially with the supply of fruit 

 by operating on the least profitable trees first, following with others in two or three 

 years, and so on until the whole are transformed into producers of excellent fruit. 

 Many gardens that bring little profit to their occupiers may by the practices indicated 

 be made remunerative. 



But some trees are so antiquated, and the varieties so inferior, as to be practically beyond 

 useful renovation. It then becomes a question of having fresh land and trees, or going 

 without fruit, and where new ground can be acquired in suitable positions, cottagers should 

 be encouraged and taught to grow fruit for home use, also for their neighbours who have no 

 trees. This would be from every point of view better than introducing so much foreign 

 produce into country towns and rural villages. For small holdings, if not large, low 

 standards on dwarfing stocks are the trees of the future, with currants, gooseberries, 

 raspberries, and strawberries between the rows and in the lines, to secure a maximum of 

 profit from the ground in the shortest time. 



Farm Gardens and Orchards. The remarks on cottage gardens apply to farm 

 gardens, in which 90 per cent, of the trees are comparatively worthless through age 

 or variety. But the farmer has not the same difficulty in securing ground for a new 

 garden or orchard, as land in most cases is available in near proximity to the home- 

 stead. The great impediment to farmers becoming fruit growers for market is not 

 so much lack of commercial enterprise as laying out capital from which they have 

 only a remote prospect of securing a fair return. The farmer, under a yearly tenancy, 



VOL. III. L L 



