No. 4.] FRUIT GKOWING. 95 



rich that it produces a large amount of wood, so that I can- 

 not get it properly thinned out. I have three men, and not 

 one has had courage enough to trim those trees as they should 

 be trimmed, so that the fruit is actually smaller than it used 

 to be on the farm where I was raised, ten miles further north, 

 where the soil was poor and gravelly. Now, I believe that 

 if you should put fifteen hundred pounds of ground bone and 

 five hundred pounds of potash on that apple orchard, you 

 would not raise any apples worth eating unless you cut the 

 trees pretty nearly down. 



Mr, Hale. I was talking about peach trees, and then 

 perhaps I was not l)uying as highly concentrated fertilizers 

 as Mr. Bowker would sell. 



Mr. Bowker. That is another thing, for it is the pit of 

 the peach, of course, that is exhaustive. The seed of the 

 apple is not anywhere near as exhaustive as the stone of the 

 peach. The practical question in this particular section is. 

 How much fertilizer should be ap})lied to an apple orchard? 



Mr. Hale. As I said at the outset, the soil here is good 

 enough ; I do not want any better soil. If I were to set out 

 a peach orchard here, I would put on some sections twice as 

 much fertilizer as on others, but I would not overdo it. If 

 I had an apple orchard like yours, which was evidently 

 growing too fast, it would show that there was too much 

 nitrogen there. Perhaps a little potash might help it. The 

 way to bring your orchard into bearing is to trim the tops 

 of the trees a little, and root-prune them a good deal. A 

 little incident in that line may be of interest to you. On my 

 home farm there is a piece of land near the houses which is 

 strong, rich, loamy soil. There are two apple trees growing 

 there, and the fruit is just about the same as that which you 

 have described. I guess we could put the apples into the 

 same barrel, and no])ody would distinguish the difference. 

 We wanted to drain a piece of low, swampy land near those 

 trees, and we went within six feet of one tree and about ten 

 feet of the other, and dug down about twelve feet, and we 

 cutoff every root of those trees on that side. That root- 

 pruning just stimulated the trees into bearing. They have 

 done nobly ever since. 



Mr. Bowker. That is just what I wanted to bring out, 



