r38 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Sei't. 15. 



of tiles botwcon overy other row. The result is, 

 thatevnry peach iiee in the orchard is within 

 9 feiH of a line of tiling. Tlien he put out his 

 trees. vvorl<ed ilie giound up tine and soft, 

 planted corn, and then t()Oi< care of the corn 

 nicfly. He niannsred exactly as Terry practices 

 and teaches. With tine-tuuth culiivaiors tie 

 broke the crust after every rain, and t<i'ptout 

 all the weeds, (^f course, the trees took hold 

 and grew. I suggested that he must have 

 manured the ground heavily; but he said hfdid 

 not. He put on iiardly enough to get a good 

 crop of corn. It was tillage and noi manure 

 that did the business. No hard ground was 

 ever to be found in that peach-orchard, neither 

 around the trees nor among the corn. The 

 corn did not amount to very much as the trees 

 became large and thrifty, it is true; bub it 

 shaded the ground, and furnished fodder 

 enough to pay the cost of cultivation. His 

 ground is almost level; in fact, it was hard 

 work to get fall enough for laying the tiles as 

 they ought to be; and ono spring he noticed 

 water standing along one row of trees. A line 

 of tile near them had gotstopped up. He open- 

 ed it and let the water off immediately; but 

 that row of trees shows the injury they receiv- 

 ed, even though the stoppage of the tiles was 

 two years ago or more. The ground had be- 

 come water soaked, the roots of th(i trees be- 

 came poisoned, and he has not been able to get 

 them over it. Peach-trees die because of too 

 much wetness— seldom from drouth. He has 

 tried waterinff some of his trees to see if it 

 would pay. Keeping the ground tine, soft, and 

 mellow seems to answer just as well or better. 

 Is it not a simple thing, first having the ground 

 thoroughly uiiderdrained, and then keeping 

 the surface soft, fine, and mellow, so that it 

 never becomes hard and baked on the surface? 

 The leaves of the trees looked green and 

 thrifty. Some of the young growth had grown 

 IS inches or 2 feet. The wood was smooth and 

 clean, and the trees were nicely shaped. He 

 has been testing almost all the standard vari- 

 eties, and he is succeeding witli every one of 

 them. In fact, I never tasted more luscious 

 peaches in my life anywhere. The sight of 

 that fruit-orchard was just wonderful to me; 

 and then it is the old, old story. In California 

 they do this very thing. They keep running 

 the cultivators until the ground is just beauti- 

 ful, it is .so soft and tine. 



Just at the beginning of the drouth I turned 

 over some old strawberry-vines. For some rea- 

 son or other I did not put on any manurei The 

 ground was dry, so we had no trouble about 

 working it over tine and soft down to quite a 

 depth. I planted kidney wax beans and Free- 

 man potatoes. The latter were not planted 

 until the 10th of July. To-day, Aug. .31, both 

 beans and jjotatoes are a mass of luxuriance; 

 and altiiougli the beans have come up and 

 grown almost without a drop of rain, they are 

 ahead of any thing I have been able to produce 

 by the use of irrigation. The potato-vines do 

 not show a particle of blight, and not a bug has 

 ever been seen on the patch. 



There is something a little funny about this 

 plan of making garden in dry dust, without 

 any rain. Some time during the fore part of 

 August we prepared another strip of ground 

 where onions had been gathered, and sowed 

 turnips, radishes, spinach, and peas. Some of 

 these seeds came up, but a good many more 

 have not germinated yet. If the ground had 

 been firmed right over the seed very thorough- 

 ly, I think all would have germinated; but I 

 was away when it was done, and I forgot to 

 tell the boys to roll the ground hard after sow- 

 ing the seed. By the way. what an easy mat- 

 ter it is to keep ground free from weeds during 



a time of drouth I The wax beans and potatoes 

 I have spoken of are cultivated with a tine- 

 tooth cultivator about once a week. Then the 

 boys go over the whole patch very quickly 

 with their hoes. A little purslane will start, 

 and some such hot-weather weeds; but just a 

 touch of the hoe, and the weeds are destroyed, 

 and the ground is nicely mellowed. Several 

 visitors have called recently— among them Mr. 

 S. T. Pettit, of Belmont, Ontario; Mr. Chris- 

 tian Weckesser. of Niagara Falls, N. Y., and 

 Mr. W. M. Kellogg, of Pleasant Hill, Mo. 

 Friend Kellogg especially wanted to see what 

 success I had had with irrigation. Well, I 

 could not show him much success; but I took 

 him down to the creek bottom, and showed him 

 the beans, potatoes, and other tilings, with 

 their bright, green, thrifty luxuriance. Then I 

 took my foot and kicked down into the soil, and 

 showed him that it was almost like road dust, 

 only it was damp as I got down an inch or two. 

 By the way, this creek bottom, the most of it, 

 has a gravelly subsoil, and in this gravel there 

 is almost always more or less water. The 

 ground was overflowed in the spring, and the 

 moisture has not all got out of the subsoil even 

 yet. Perhaps this has something to do with 

 the success of my gardening during times of 

 drouth; but not altogether, for we have straw- 

 berries up by the windmill, thrifty and green, 

 on the highest grotind anywhere in the neigh- 

 borhood. They are on clover sod, and the 

 grouiul is soft and fine, like that on the creek 

 bottom. The strawberries, however, are not 

 making well rooted runners, without rain. But 

 they are growing rapidly, putting out lots of 

 runners, which we are covering at each bud; 

 and with the advent of rain we shall have an 

 abundance of plants in a very short time. 



It is not easy getting this very fine dust be- 

 tween and all around your plants, with crops 

 in. in the spring; but after you have I'emoved 

 early crops you can plow the ground and work 

 it fine and deep way down; then set out your 

 plants, or plant your seeds, and then it is an 

 easy mattei' to keep the ground soft by simply 

 working the crust or stirring the surface, if 

 you do not have rain. With raspberries, black- 

 berries, and even peach-trees, it is not quite so 

 easy. However, if you have your ground well 

 uiiderdrained, then finely worked up before the 

 trees or bushes are planted, by being very thor- 

 ough you can keep it soft and fine the year 

 round — that is, whenever it is not too wet; and 

 if thoroughly underdrained it should almost 

 never be too wet to work. Now, then, before 

 investing money in windmills, engines, and 

 reservoirs. I would test thoroughly this matter 

 of thorough tillage. 



GAKDENIKG DUKING DROUTH. 



The kidney wax beans referred to elsewhere 

 are now giving us the finest crop of wax beans 

 we ever grew. There is not a bean with a speck 

 of rust on it in a whole bushel. Very likely 

 this is because there has been no rain, and wax 

 beans on soil like that which I have described, 

 well cultivated, I should say are better off with- 

 out rain. I do not think I ever saw a better 

 crop under any circumstances. The two large 

 bu'*h limas — the Kumerle and Burpee — are also 

 doing splendidly; but the Burpee is giving us 

 the largest crop, because the pods are larger; 

 there are more beans in a pod. and the beans 

 themselves are larger. One of the boys said, a 

 few days ago. that he could gather a peck in 

 ten minutes. They were planted in some very 

 poor ground — in fact, on a piece that I rented; 

 therefore I did not go to the expense of under- 

 draining or very heavy manuring. There is, 

 perhaps, an eigiith of an acre; and while the 

 yield may not be quite equal to the same amount 



