122 THE CONNECTICUT POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY 



done. Put your fertilizer where you want your roots, and 

 you will get them there. You can call them as you can 

 call a flock of hens. If you only top-dress, which is all you 

 can do, unless you cultivate, the tree roots will come to the 

 surface, where they will suffer from drought sometimes, and 

 from competition with grass roots at all times. 



Third : Don't forget lime in some form, as a necessary 

 plant-food. If you are using wood ashes freely, as many 

 of our orchardists are doing, your orchard gets all the lime 

 it needs. Over one-third of ordinary Canada unleached 

 ashes is carbonate of lime. But if you use muriate of 

 potash instead of ashes, try putting on half a ton of lime 

 to the acre every few j^ears. It will settle the lime ques- 

 tion, and will very likely make your fertilizer nitrogen more 

 available. 



Fourth: Don't be afraid to put on nitrogen, quickly- 

 available nitrogen, and plenty of it. Don't give too much 

 thought to the talk that nitrogen makes the tree run to wood 

 and leaves. A peach crop takes off from the orchard nearly 

 as much nitrogen as it does potash. We found 20 pounds of 

 nitrogen in a peach crop, and 22 pounds of potash. We 

 found twice as much nitrogen as potash in peach twigs 

 and small branches. In the roots, limbs and trunks of the 

 apple. Professor Roberts found as much nitrogen as potash, 

 and in the green leaves, two-thirds as much nitrogen as 

 potash. Your crop doesn't grow on air. It must grow on 

 sound, lusty wood, and only there, and sound wood must 

 have plenty of nitrogen for its growth. A well-balanced 

 fertilizer will not make a tree "run" to this or that; a 

 well-fed tree will do what it was meant to do from the 

 beginning, and unless you starve it in one direction, you 

 cannot inake it run perversely in another. Nitrate of soda 

 has been used on nursery stock, and also on peach orchards 

 in bearing, with excellent effect. Cheaper forms of nitro- 

 gen may also be used, especially where the orchard is 

 cultivated in early summer. 



Fifth: Remember that cultivating is fertilizing. Dried 

 blood, bone, cotton-seed meal, and all the organic forms of 

 nitrogen are thrown away in a soil too wet or too drj^ or 

 not well supplied with air. They need to be tickled with 



