ORCHARDS. 49 



inches in circumference. Trees that have had one year's free 

 growth from the bud, and have become well confirmed upon the 

 stock, if taken up, as they well may be, with the roots nearly 

 entire, and transplanted immediately, will grow right along 

 witliout seeming much to feel the removal. 



The soil in which my trees are set is very light and sandy, 

 insomuch that persons sometimes have been led to entertain a 

 doubt in their own minds of its capability to bear anything to 

 much purpose. Underneath the surface soil is found, mainly, 

 gravel or sand of different degrees of fineness. 



Of the trees, twenty stand twenty-five feet apart, in a row, by 

 the roadside. The other thirty-three are in three rows, thirty 

 feet between the rows, and the trees twenty-seven feet apart in 

 the rows, upon ground sloping to the north-west, and so steep 

 that the upper row stands upon an embankment or terrace. 

 This land was completely waste, overgrown with laurel and 

 other shrubs. The bushes were cleared off and the ground 

 ploughed, as well as it admitted, and after a couple of years' 

 hoeing, being partially subdued and smoothed down, the trees 

 were set, the first in 1863, the rest the next year. The ground 

 has been ploughed and cultivated from year to year with hoed 

 crops, chiefly potatoes and beans, and manured for planting, but 

 only in the hill, and that quite moderately. 



When the trees were planted, places were dug for their beds 

 eighteen to twenty-four inches in depth, and five feet or more 

 across. These were filled again with the best of the surface 

 soil about the spot, intermingled with a bushel or so of leather 

 chips and waste, and as much, or rather more compost from barn 

 cellar, consisting of loam, barn manure, vegetable waste, and 

 the like, with sink water, &c. When these ingredients were 

 well forked over, a peck or thereabouts of leached ashes and two 

 quarts of air-slaked lime to each tree, were spread upon the 

 surface and slightly dug in, and then the trees were set. 



Since the setting I have had, every year, a few shovelfuls of 

 the same compost spread about each tree and dug in with the 

 soil in the spring. Through the summer the ground about the 

 trees has been hoed over occasionally to keep the weeds down 

 and the surface light. After some of the trees were set, the 

 weather proving dry, I had such of them as were in the most 

 7 



