200 The Connecticut Pomological Society 



meant to do from the beginning, and unless you starve it in 

 one direction, you cannot moke it run perversely in another. 



5. Remember that cultivating is fertilizing. Dried blood, 

 bone, cottonseed meal, and all the organic forms of nitrogen 

 are thrown away in a soil too wet or too dry or not well sup- 

 plied with air. They need to be tickled with the cultivator, 

 and to have the soil above them lightened to let in air, so that, 

 by microbe action, their nitrogen may take the form of nitrate, 

 and go to feed the trees. 



6. Does it pay to practice green manuring with rye or with 

 crimson clover? Sometimes; and then, again, sometimes not. 

 Think first what green manuring does — that is book farming; 

 and then think whether your land needs that thing done — that 

 is practical farming. Either crop gets a start in midsummer or 

 early fall. Now before clover or rye do much of anything above 

 ground they send out and down a very large root -system below 

 ground. While the crop looks as though it were standing still 

 for several weeks, it is growing tremendously below ground, 

 and reaching out and laying hold of all the available food that 

 it can get. It takes very little moisture out of the surface soil 

 in the fall of the year, but takes up available plant -food rapidly. 

 If the crop is clover, and if the soil is not rich in available nitro- 

 gen, — and it is not likely to be, — considerable nitrogen may be 

 taken out of the air and fixed by the clover for its use. When 

 spring comes, assuming that the crop is not winter-killed, a 

 rapid growth begins above ground. The green crop still 

 draws some food from the soil, and as its foliage increases, 

 pumps water also out of the soil at a pretty rapid rate.. This 

 goes on until the crop is turned under. Then decay begins, 

 going on much more quickly in clover than in a grain crop, 

 and gradually the plant -food of this green mass is turned over 

 to the growing trees. 



In the spring I would not call it any great loss if the crop 

 dies, as crimson clover is so likely to do after living all winter. 

 The plant -food is there in its roots ready to be taken up by 

 the trees. But if the crop is all there in the spring, how long 

 shall we let it grow? Some do not plow till the middle of May, 

 when the clover is in full bloom. I question whether, when 

 turned under as late as that, the trees will get very much 



