STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 97 



Now as to the crops to grow. You can grow any hoed crop 

 to good advantage, Hke corn, potatoes and market vegetables. 

 Even asparagus and small fruits come in to good advantage, the 

 strawberry, the raspberry, the blackberry, and the currant. If 

 you want to utilize those crops to help pay your bills as you go 

 along it is a perfectly legitimate proposition. In our own opera- 

 tions I have used the regular farm crops, like potatoes and corn, 

 and a portion of the time tobacco, because we are just on the 

 edge of the tobacco belt. Market vegetables, like cabbage and 

 tomatoes, are good, and the more intensively you grow them, 

 the better your orchards will be. The best block of trees I ever 

 grew was a block that was started with tobacco, because there 

 is no crop we grow in Massachusetts, or perhaps that is grown 

 in New England, that calls for such intensive fertilization and 

 such a large amount of stirring of the soil to continue the growth 

 of the crop ; and the more attention we give to the crop that is 

 planted on the section the better the trees will grow. 



Set the trees a good distance apart. Two great fundamental 

 troubles have been in the past, in orcharding in New England, 

 that the trees have been planted too close together, and too 

 many varieties have been planted. We can now realize by 

 glancing around us and seeing the mistakes that have been made 

 in the past, how important it is to set our trees so that we may 

 allow such a growth as they are to make. Of course thirty or 

 forty feet seems a long distance apart to plant trees no larger 

 than your finger or thumb. But we know by experience that a 

 few years brings a great change in the appearance of the tree, 

 and we know that if we are to succeed in the largest measure, 

 our trees must have ample space in which to expand and develop. 



I think the best plan in establishing an orchard today, where 

 we desire to utilize the largest amount of the surface of the land 

 possible, is to plant some standard variety for a permanent tree, 

 a Baldwin, or a Spy, or a Greening, and interplant with some 

 smaller growing variety which bears earlier than our standard 

 varieties do ; and when the standards come to that estate when 

 they need the entire area of land, simply cut out the other 

 trees. Many an orchard has been planted with the idea of cut- 

 ting out every other tree when they encroached upon each other, 

 but it is very rarely that that has been done in the past. I think 

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