CHAPTER IV 

 ESTABLISHING THE ORCHARD 



With the nursery stock ordered and the orchard site chosen, 

 we are free to consider the question of preparing the land and 

 setting the trees. The preparation ought to be as thorough as the 

 circumstances will permit. In actual practice, among good 

 growers, it will vary all the way from the man who wants to 

 know at least a year in advance where he is going to set his 

 trees in order that he may grow a crop on the land that will 

 leave the soil in the best possible condition for the young orchard, 

 to the man who plow^s up old pasture for his orchard, or the man 

 who does not even insist that the land shall be fully cleared of 

 stumps. The results will vary just as widely though not in 

 exactly the same way. That is, the man who uses stump land 

 may develop a fine lot of trees, provided the soil is naturally 

 good and provided also that he takes good care of the trees. The 

 objection to the method is the diificulty he experiences in taking 

 good care of them, and the danger that this difficulty will dis- 

 courage him. The writer very much prefers to have the land 

 under cultivation the year before the orchard is set out, and if 

 the crop grown on the land can be one which leaves the soil in 

 specially good condition, such a crop as beans, or buckwheat, 

 or even corn or potatoes, so much the better. 



One Year's Preparation. — In one orchard which the writer 

 had a hand m setting, there was a block of sixteen acres which 

 was mostly old pasture but in one corner of which a field of 

 about four acres had been fenced off the year previous and 

 planted to corn. When the orchard was set this fence was re- 

 moved and the whole block treated alike in preparation and set 

 out to trees. It ought to be said also that the soil of the entire 

 block was quite uniform, and yet when the trees began to 

 grow those on the corn field were noticeably more thrifty than 

 those on the old pasture and this difference was noticeable for 

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