pomology 
The surface tilth may be secured by breaking the top- 
soil early in spring with a cutaway harrow, gang plow 
or other surface-working tools. This may not be pos- 
sible, however, on very heavy lands. The cover-crop 
adds humus and protects the land from puddling and 
baking in the winter. If it is a leguminous crop it also 
adds a store of available nitrogen. It is possible, in 
many cases, to use cover-crops so freely, particularly 
of the leguminous kind, that the land becomes too rich 
in nitrogen and the fruit plants make too heavy growth. 
Usually the cover-crop is plowed under in spring at the 
very earliest opportunity in order to save the soil moist- 
ure. It is by no means the universal practice to use 
cover-crops on fruit lands, but the idea has come to 
stay, and the grower may adopt it or not as his judg- 
ment dictates. In order to facilitate the economical 
and efficient tillage of fruit lands, it is coming to be the 
practice to devote the land wholly to the fruits. with 
plums and pears and some other orchard fruits, it is 
often allowable to use the land for the first two or three 
years for annual crops, but these crops should gradu- 
ally diminish and every caution should be taken that 
they do not interfere with the care of the trees. Apple 
orchards, when the spaces are 40 feet apart, may be 
cropped for six or eight years without injury, providing 
good tillage and other efficient treatment are given. 
One reason for allowing orchards to stand in sod in the 
old times was that it was difficult to plow beneath 
full-grown trees. Those persons who desired to plow 
and till their orchards, therefore, advocated very high 
pruning. The difficulty with these old orchards was 
the fact that the land was allowed to run into dense 
sod. Heavy plowing in an old orchard indicates that 
the plantation has been neglected in previous years. 
Orchards that have been well tilled from the first do 
not require much laborious tillage, and the roots are 
low enough to escape tillage tools. In recent times, 
there has been an evolution of tillage tools which will do 
the work without necessity of pruning the tops very 
high. Within the last ten years, at least in the eastern 
states, the practice of tilling orchards has increased 
rapidly. At first it was advised by a few growers and 
teachers, but the movement is now so well established 
that it will take care of itself, and in the commercial 
orchards of New York state, at least, the man who does 
not till his orchard is the one who needs to apologize. 
On the Pacific coast, the importance of tillage is uni- 
versally recognized, because of the dry 
mate. The necessity of tilling orchards 
new ideal on the pomologist; and when he 
expense of tilling he feels the necessity of giving 
sufficient care in other directions to insure profitable 
returns from his plantation. 
4. More and more, as competition increases, is it 
necessary to give attention to pruning. it is unfortu- 
nately true that trees will bear without pruning. This, 
therefore, puts a premium on neglect. The old practice 
allowed the tree to grow at will for three or four years 
and to become so full of brush that the fruit could not 
be well harvested, and then the top was pruned vio- 
lently. The result was that the tree was set into redun- 
dant growth and was filled with water-sprouts. This 
tended also to set the tree into wood-bearing rather 
than into fruit-bearing. By the time the tree had again 
settled down to fruit-bearing the orchardist went at it 
with ax and saw and a good part of the top was taken 
away. tt is now understood that the ideal pruning is 
that which prunes a hill.' every year and keeps the tree 
in a uniformly healthy and productive condition. The 
pruning of trees has now come to be a distinct ideal, and 
long as fruit trees are grown. See the article pruning. 
5. Now that there is demand for the very best prod- 
ucts, it is increasingly more important that fruits be 
thinned. The thinning allows the remaining fruits to 
grow larger and better, it saves the vitality of the tree, 
and it gives the orchardist an opportunity to remove the 
diseased specimens and thereby to contribute something 
toward checking the spread of insects and fungi. Thin- 
ning is exceedingly important in all fruits that are 
essentially luxuries, as peaches, apricots and pears. It 
is coming also to be more and more important for apples 
and for others of the cheaper fruits. In the thinning of 
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fruits, there are always two rules to be kept in mind: 
(1) Remove the injured, imperfect or diseased speci- 
mens; (2) remove sufficient fruit so that the remaining 
specimens stand at a given distance from each other. 
How far apart the fruit shall be, will depend on many 
conditions. With peaches it is a good rule not to allow 
them to hang closer than four or five inches (sometimes 
7 or 8 in.), and in years of heavy crops they may be 
thinned more than this. This amount of thinning often 
removes two-thirds of the fruits. It nearly always 
gives a larger bulk of fruit, which brings a higher price. 
