POMOLOGY 



The surface tilth may bo secured by breaking the top- 

 soil early in spring with a cutaway harrow, gang plow 

 or other surface-working tools. This may not be pos- 

 sible, however, on very heavy lands. The cover-cioj) 

 adds humus and protects the land from puddling and 

 baking in the winter. If it is a leguminous crop it also 

 adds a store of availal)le nitrogen. It is possil>le, in 

 many cases, to use cover-crops so freely, particularly 

 of the leguminous kind, that the land becomes too rich 

 in nitrogen and the fruit plants make too heavy growth. 

 Usually the cover-crop is plowed under in spring at the 

 very earliest opportunity in order to save the soil moist- 

 ure. It is by no means the universal practice to use 

 cover-crops on fruit lands, but the idea has come to 

 stay, and the grower may adopt it or not as his judg- 

 ment dictates. In order to facilitate the economical 

 and efficient tillage of fruit lands, it is coming to be the 

 practice to devote the land wholly to the fruits. With 

 plums and pears and some other orchard fruits, it is 

 often allowable to use the land for the lirst two or three 

 years for annual crops, but these crops should gradu- 

 ally diminish and every caution should be taken that 

 they do not interfere with the care of the trees. Apple 

 orchards, when the spaces are 40 feet apart, may be 

 cropped for six or eight years without injury, providing 

 good tillage and other efficient treatment are given. 

 One reason for allowing orchards to stand in sod in the 

 old times was that it was difficult to plow beneath 

 full-grown trees. Those persons who desired to plow 

 and till their orchards, therefore, advocated very high 

 pruning. The difficulty with these old orchards was 

 the fact that the land was allowed to run into dense 

 sod. Heavy plowing in an old orchard indicates that 

 the plantation has been neglected in previous years. 

 Orchards that have been well tilled from the first do 

 not require much laborious tillage, and the roots are 

 low enough to escape tillage tools. In recent times, 

 there has been an evolution of tillage tools which will do 

 the work without necessity of pruning the tops very 

 high.. Within the last ten years, at least in the eastern 

 states, the practice of tilling orchards has increased 

 rapidlj'. At first it was advised by a few growers and 

 teachers, but the movement is now so well established 

 that it will take care of itself, and in the commercial 

 orchards of New York state, at least, the man who does 

 not till his orchard is the one who needs to apologize. 

 On the Pacific coast, the importance of tillage is uni- 

 versally recognized, because of the dry summer cli- 

 mate. The necessity of tilling orchards has forced a 

 new ideal on the pomologist; and when he goes to the 

 expense of tilling he feels the necessity of giving 

 sufficient care in other directions to insure profitable 

 returns from his plantation. 



4. More and more, as competition increases, is it 

 necessary to give attention to pruning. It is unfortu- 

 nately true that trees will bear without pruning. This, 

 therefore, puts a premium on neglect. The old practice 

 allowed the tree to grow at will for three or four years 

 and to become so full of brush that the fruit could not 

 be well harvested, and then the top was pruned vio- 

 lently. The result was that the tree was set into redun- 

 •dant growth and was filled with water-sprouts. This 

 tended also to set the tree into wood-bearing rather 

 than into fruit-bearing. By the time the tree had again 

 settled down to friiit-bearing the orchardist went at it 

 with ax and saw and a good part of the top was taken 

 away. It is now understood that the ideal pruning is 

 that which prunes a little every year and keeps the tree 

 in a uniformly healthy and productive condition. The 

 pruning of trees has now come to be a distinct ideal, and 

 this ideal must gain in definiteness and precision so 

 long as fruit trees are grown. See the article Pruning. 



5. Now that there is demand for the very best prod- 

 ucts, it is increasingly more important that fruits be 

 thinned. The thinning allows the remaining fruits to 

 grow larger and better, it saves the vitality of the tree, 

 and it gives the orchardist an opportunity to remove the 

 diseased specimens and thereby to contribute something 

 toward checking the spread of insects and fungi. Thin- 

 ning is exceedingly important in all fruits that are 

 essentially luxuries, as peaches, apricots and pears. It 

 is coming also to be more and more important for apples 

 and for others of the cheaper fruits. In the thinning of 



POMOLOGY 



1401 



fruits, there are always two rules to be kept in mind: 

 (1) Kemove the injured, imperfect or diseased speci- 

 mens; (2) remove sufficient fruit so that the remaining 

 specimens stand at a given distance from each other. 

 How far apart the fruit shall be, will depend on many 



1896. The American ideal in nursery stock,— laree, straieht. 

 uniform, hieh-topped trees. 



conditions. With peaches it is a good rule not to allow 

 them to hang closer than four or five inches (sometimes 

 7 or 8 in.), and in years of heavy crops they may be 

 thinned more than this. This amount of thinning often 

 removes two - thirds of the fruits. It nearly always 

 gives a larger bulk of fruit, which brings a higher price. 



