202 CULTURE AND MANAGEMENT 



ing is useless, as well as injurious ; useless, because 

 nothing can be raised in the orchard, by reason 

 the trees will shade all the ground, or nearly so; 

 injurious, because either the roots, stock, or bran- 

 ches will be wounded : neither is it necessary ever 

 to manure peach trees, as manured trees will always 

 produce less and worse fruit than trees that are 

 not manured ; although by manuring your peach 

 trees, they will grow larger, and look greener and 

 thicker in the boughs, and cause a thicker shade, 

 yet on them will grow very little fruit, and that lit- 

 tle will be of a very bad kind generally looking 

 as green as the leaves, even when ripe, and later 

 than those that have never been manured/" 



" Peach trees never require a rich soil ; the 

 poorer the soil, the better the fruit a middling soil 

 produces a more bountiful crop. 



" The highest ground, and the north side of hills 

 is best for peach trees; they keep back vegeta- 

 tion, by which means the fruit is often preserved 

 from being killed by late frosts in the month of 

 April, in the Pennsylvania latitude. I have made 

 these observations from actual experience. 



" A gentleman from Monongahela county, in 

 Virginia, called at my house, and asked me who 

 instructed me to cultivate peach trees : I told him 

 that observation and experience were my teachers. 

 The gentleman observed, that colonel Luther Mar- 

 tin, in the lower parts of Maryland, and another 

 gentleman, near the same place, whose name he 

 could not recollect, were pursuing the same plan 

 advantageously." 



* ** This assertion is directly contrary to the experience of a 

 gentleman in New Jersey, who has remarkably fine peaches, 

 regularly manures his trees every year, and asserts that the 

 speedy decay of common peach tre^s is owing chiefly to a neg- 

 lect of the practice. He even said experience convinced him it 

 was owing to the same circumstance, that peach stones did not, 

 in general, produce fruit like the original tree. 



