20 



they get the inevitable and necessary opening-up by 

 trenching. Heavy manuring is the cultural need of 

 annual crops which have to spring up, blossom and seed at 

 racing pace, to get through with their short lives within 

 the year. Your fruit trees do not take life so fast, and 

 they therefore do not require the stimulus appropriate to 

 cereals and root-crops whose work is done in five or six 

 months. The parallel of the vine, which takes an enormous 

 manure supply every second or third season, does not run 

 exactly on all fours with the apple, peach and pear. These 

 trees and their like are not every year cut back to mere 

 skeletons of their former selves, and have not to make a 

 forest of bearing wood betimes to carry the great crop of 

 fruit they proffer to the farmer. The vine's annual output 

 is excessive compared with that of ordinary fruit trees, 

 especially when you consider how small an average vine is 

 and how much larger an orchard tree. But common sense 

 will show that the more deliberate growth and more 

 limited fruiting of the orchard calls for less manurial en- 

 richment. 



Laying Out and Planting. 



20. Let us suppose that by the means indicated, either the 

 whole area of the orchard or the alternating 20-foot strips 

 of which we have spoken, have been thoroughly broken 

 up and converted into mellow, Avell-aerated soil. The 

 drains have also been laid out and their trenches filled in. 

 On no account will the judicious cultivator submit to have 

 an open drain left upon land that he cares for. It is a 

 waste of so much space. Its side-slopes inevitably become 

 gardens of weeds and harbours for pests innumerable. The 

 flume that brings the irrigation-water to the land must 

 perhaps be open, and the evils of that openness must be 

 put up with and kept in check by constant care. Some 

 day, it is to be hoped in the near future, we shall either 

 pave our water-flume with shale or some other material, 

 the rejected wane-planks of the saw-pit, or possibly the same 

 sort of galvanized iron that is doing duty in our French 

 drains. We shall by this means get rid of the perpetual 

 troubles arising from the damage to the banks by tread of 

 feet and the enormous loss that accrues through soakage. 



