204 PEACHES. 



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

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

 es will be wounded ; neither is it necessary ever to 

 manure peach trees, as manured trees will always pro- 

 duce less and worse fruit than trees that are not ma- 

 nured ; 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 little 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 produ- 

 ces a more bountiful crop. 



"The highest ground, and the north side of hills is 

 best for peach trees ; they keep back vegetation, 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 observa- 

 tions from actual experience. 



"A gentleman from Monongahela county, in Vir- 

 ginia, called at my house, and asked me who instruct- 

 ed me to cultivate peach trees : I told him that ob- 

 servation and experience were my teachers. The 

 gentleman observed, that colonel Luther Martin, in 

 the lower parts of Maryland, and another gentleman 

 near the same place, whose name he could not recol- 

 lect, were pursuing the same plan advantageously." 



"The practice of Mr. Coulter, in cutting down the 



* "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 trees 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. 



