FRUIT CULTURE FOR PROFIT. 423 



suppose that the ordinary and uninstructed farm labourer 

 can plant and manage an orchard properly. You might 

 as well set him to make a coat or a pair of shoes. The 

 results of the former task would not be so quickly visible, 

 but they would be as unsatisfactory in the end. It would 

 surely make some of the present writers on this subject 

 blush to find how much wiser their forefathers were on 

 this subject. Hear what Henry Dethicke says in " The 

 Gardeners' Labyrinth/* published more than 300 years 

 ago : " Not sufficient is it to a gardener that he knoweth, 

 or would the furtherance of the garden, without any cost 

 bestowed, which the works and labour of the same require. 

 No. The will, again, of the workman, in doing and be- 

 stowing of charges, shall small avail without he have both 

 art and skill in the same. For that cause it is the chiefest 

 point in every faculty and business to understand and 

 know what to begin and follow." This was the wisdom of 

 our ancestors ; and this view has been endorsed by every 

 subsequent writer who knows his business, until a very 

 recent period. But now, at the close of this nineteenth 

 century, when everybody writes, it has become fashionable 

 for those who do not know to undertake to instruct the 

 public. Blind leaders of the blind ! they substitute bold 

 and reckless assertions for the thoughtful and painstaking 

 deductions from experiments made and recorded by ex- 

 perts of the past. 



If I were about to plant fruit trees I would dig or 

 trench the ground two spits deep. A few light yielding 

 soils might be efficiently prepared by the subsoil plough, 

 but even in dealing with them the spade is a better 

 instrument than the plough. Of course, the manuring and 

 working of the soil is, or should be, more costly than in 

 ordinary farm operations, and the cultivation of the trees 

 by pruning, and keeping free from insects, is necessary, 

 and is also an item of cost in labour which must not be 

 lost sight of. 



The practice of " sticking in " a few trees, by which is 



