84 CULTIVATION OF THE SOIL. 



trees too much by its formidable stalks. All sown crops are 

 to be avoided, and grass is still worse. Meadows are ruin- 

 ous. An acquaintance who purchased a hundred peach 

 trees and placed them in meadow land, lost most of them 

 by the overgrowth of the grass ; and the following winter, 

 the mice, who avoid clean culture, destroyed the remainder. 



Every one was lost. A clean, mellow, cultivated piece 

 of ground, kept so a few years, might have saved the whole 

 of them, and brought them into bearing. 



A chief reason of the fatal effects of sown crops, is the 

 impossibility of mellowing the ground by repeated culti- 

 vation. For this reason, a low crop of peas has been found 

 much worse than a heavy growth of Indian corn. A large 

 peach orchard was sown with peas, and bordered on one 

 side with corn, in which one row of the peach trees stood. 

 Such was the benefit derived by them from the hoeing 

 given to the corn, that the single row was most con- 

 spicuously visible by the deeper green of its foliage, at the 

 distance of half a mile. 



Low hoed crops have been recommended. But the more 

 frequently the plow or cultivator passes among them, the 

 greater will be the benefit to the tree. A friend, who well 

 understands thorough cultivation, found that his young and 

 newly planted standards which stood among the small 

 seedling trees of his nursery, and which received the 

 benefit of constant and continued working till autumn, 

 made twice the growth of those in a field of beets, and 

 which was kept well hoed only through the early part of 

 the season, or till the crop covered the ground. Some of the 

 former made shoots the first year four feet in length. The 

 best peach orchard for market crops in western New York, 

 is kept mellow by deep and thorough tillage without any 

 other crop, and the improved quality and amount of the 

 fruit is found of greater consequence than any other pro- 

 duct of the land. The same course is pursued with the 

 best of the great peach orchards which supply the city of 

 Philadelphia. 



A very mistaken policy is the selection of uneven or 

 stony ground for orchards, which cannot be cultivated or 

 occupied with any thing else. The truth should be unal- 

 terably fixed on every farmer's mind, that the orchard 



