AGEICULTURE. 185 



and the price of fruit rapidly falling from year to year ; the 

 trunk is shaded, and protected against the disease called the 

 sun-scald ; the earth about the roots is kept moist ; and the 

 trees are protected against the wind. 



The trees are planted from one-sixth to one-half nearer to- 

 gether in the orchards than in the Eastern states. This is an 

 additional protection agamst sun and wind. The ground is 

 ploughed several tunes every summer, and kept clean ; whereas 

 in the Eastern orchards it is common to sow grass or cultivate 

 veo-etables. Our apple-trees are free from the borers after the 

 first year, and our plum and cherry trees from the curcuho, 

 though the plum suffers from the aphis or louse. 



Fruit-trees in California are generally as large at two years 

 old as they are in New York at three and four years. The in- 

 stances of unusually rapid growth here are without parallel 

 elsewhere. Cherry-trees have grown to be fourteen feet high 

 in one year; pear-trees ten feet high; peach-trees to have 

 trunks from two to three inches in diameter. These were all 

 from buds on yearling stocks, and were well provided with 

 branches— not trimmed to gain height. These specimens of 

 rapid growth were observed on an island near the junction of 

 the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. At Petaluma, a 

 cherry-tree two years old from the graft, and three from the 

 seed, had a trunk seven inches and three-quarters round ; a 

 plum-tree, three years from the seed, was eleven feet high, and 

 had a trunk seven inches in circumference ; and a peach-tree, 

 one year from the bud, was eight feet high and eight and a 

 half inches round. 



Mr. E. B. Crocker, of Sacramento, wrote thus in December, 

 1858: "In January, 1855, I planted a small almond-tree, with 

 a stem little larger than a goosequill, and which I cut dowm 

 within a few inches of the ground. It is now a tree twenty 

 feet high, sixteen feet through the top, with branches starting 

 from the surface of the earth. The body below the branches 



is twenty-four inches in circumference A Glout Morceau 



dwarf pear-tree, planted in 1855, when it had grown one year 



