18 Hints on Vegetable and Fruit Farming. 



a large scale. When the cultivators have found out the pleasant 

 results of growing those that have been described, they will be 

 keen enough to adopt any others which they may think will 

 pay. . 



Fruit-Gkowing. 



Many of the remarks that have been made concerning vege- 

 table-growing will equally apply to fruit-growing. By far the 

 greater part of the land in England will grow fruit of some 

 sort or other. The sorts that may be peculiarly suited for cer- 

 tain districts may be ascertained from examination of the 

 fruit-trees in the gardens, and, at least in the case of quick- 

 growing bush fruit-trees, by planting some as an experiment. 

 The garden of the farm should be made the base of operations 

 with fruit-trees as with vegetables, and the extension of their 

 culture may be made large or small, with these fruits, or with 

 those fruits, according to circumstances. It would for instance 

 be most unwise to form an apple-orchard or a cherry-orchard or 

 plum-orchard in a locality where these fruit-trees had previously 

 not been cultivated, until careful inquiry had been made and 

 the opinion of experts obtained ; or to plant any particular sorts 

 of these without first finding out, as far as possible, whether 

 it were likely that the conditions of soil, climate, and situation 

 would suit them. 



A tenant would hardly plant fruit-bushes or fruit-trees unless 

 he had a lease ; he should also have a guarantee of payment for 

 the increased value that he had imparted to the land. He 

 would hardly be justified in planting standard fruit-trees unless 

 he were assured of definite and sufficient compensation for this 

 improvement. In some fruit-growing counties it is customary 

 for the landlord to find the standard trees and the tenant to pay 

 for planting them, but no special compensation for unexhausted 

 improvements is allowed. In the Agricultural Holdings Act 

 planting orchards is one of the thirteen improvements of the 

 first class, which continue unexhausted for twenty years, and it 

 would give a stimulus to fruit-planting if tenants could be 

 guaranteed compensation even at this rate, which, however, is 

 not by any means adequate in the case of apple, pear, and 

 cherry-trees. The uncertainties of land-tenure have much hin- 

 dered the increase of fruit-land. Some few tenants who are of 

 a confiding nature and have " long leases and practical land- 

 lords," as a large fruit-grower remarked lately, do plant fruit- 

 trees ; but most tenants are bound to require something more 

 than this before they thus improve the property of other persons. 

 To make fruit-plantations, and apple and cherry-orchards espe- 



