AMERICAN HOME GARDEN. 249 



care should be taken to apply it rather in deficiency tnan in 

 excess, watching the effect upon the trees in your own partic- 

 ular locality and soil, and repeating or discontinuing its use 

 accordingly, always aiming to induce moderate and regular 

 growth, and steady rather than excessive bearing. 



In orchard culture, where the plow can be freely used, it will 

 be found a good practice to plow carefully once every third or 

 fourth year, turning under, if convenient, a very light coat of 

 barn-yard manure with the sod, and harrowing in thoroughly 

 from fifteen to thirty bushels of lime per acre ; seed immedi- 

 ately with clover, or clover and orchard grass ; and top-dress 

 annually with eighty or a hundred pounds of plaster to the 

 acre, or alternate this with one hundred and fifty pounds of 

 guano, or twenty bushels of ashes, and your orchard will thrive 

 and your land improve. 



COMBINATION OP FRUITS. 



In the cultivation of various fruits, it is often agreeable, and 

 may sometimes economize land and labor to combine them in 

 the same orchard or plot. Thus, if apple-trees on common 

 stocks are planted in alternated rows forty feet by thirty-four, 

 they may be filled in with dwarf trees of any desired kinds by 

 planting them in the line of the orchard trees at ten feet apart, 

 with two full rows at the same distance between, in the thirty- 

 four feet spaces, which will allow the rows to be made eleven 

 and one third feet apart. The trees in a plot thus filled up 

 will stand at right angles, eleven and one third by ten feet dis- 

 tance, each having one hundred and thirteen and a third square 

 feet of space. See Plan No. 1, A, A, B, B, B. 



The smaller trees are to be removed gradually as the ad- 

 vancing growth of the main orchard may require. 



In planting pear-trees, twenty-five feet by twenty-one, or 

 twenty by seventeen, a single row of dwarfed pears may be 

 planted each way in like manner, standing twelve and a half 

 feet by ten, or ten by eight and a half. Cherry, pear, or high- 

 stemmed quince-trees may be set to advantage in the rows of 

 raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, or currants, also along 

 the centre of strawberry-beds, and it will be found a good mode 



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