CHAPTER VIII. 



Cultivation. 



THE following remarks are intended to be of general 

 application all over the country, but in regard to the 

 peach, I would especially commend them to our coast 

 country fruit-growers. If asked the very best location and 

 treatment for a peach orchard here, I would answer most em- 

 phatically, one broken just as shallow as possible, and with 

 root-pruned trees, planted in as small holes as possible, and 

 rammed tight. Or, better still, the unbroken prairie sod, the 

 grass being killed for a foot or so where the trees are to stand, 

 and the whole ground "cultivated " with a mowing machine 

 often enough to keep the grass down to within four or five 

 inches at the outside, and better less. Root-pruned trees on 

 fairly well drained ground, thus treated and fertilized moder- 

 ately, will live for many years and bear fine crops of large 

 fruit, while those on deeply stirred soil and annually plowed 

 will invariably die inside of six years ; at least those set with 

 long roots will, and very likely the root-pruned also, for the 

 peach cannot stand a loose surfaced, saturated soil in this 

 level country. 



Having shown, first, that a long and fibrous-rooted is a 

 radically wrong form of tree for planting ; and secondly, that 

 large holes and a deeply pulverized soil, in which such trees 

 are ordinarily set, and which they fill in a few years with the 

 bulk of their roots, are receptacles for holding the semi-stag- 

 nant water, often for days, even on well-drained ground, dur- 

 ing and after continued heavy rains, followed by scalding sun- 

 shine in summer and also intense cold in winter at the North, 

 I will now take up the third probable cause of the early de- 

 cline and death of many latter-day orchards, especially the 

 peach, and that is, the annual more or less deep plowing to 

 which nearly all are subjected, all over the country. 



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