84 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



the advantages of feeding corn and oil meal and roots to sheep 

 and swine in the apple orchard, should have been so much neg- 

 lected. The sheep ruminates so industriously and digests so 

 thoroughly, that he needs no aid from grinding or cooking corn. 

 There is no living thing more easily fed. And there is no need to 

 doubt that there is great profit in feeding provender to sheep in 

 summer and autumn. Heavy pelts and fat mutton are always 

 goodly commodities, and next to cash in hand. Let pasture grasses 

 lend their aid, and in the autumn let refuse apples, and the tops or 

 roots of beets, be added to the corn or oil meal consumed. If the 

 orchard is, for the time being, in grass, this will be an adjunct. 

 And the other materials, fed to the fattening flock in the difl'erent 

 parts, will be profitably converted to wool and flesh in part, and 

 the residue spread broadcast to replenish the soil. And as the 

 sales will pay the price of the unfatted sheep, and the cost of 

 fattening, and ordinarily leave a profit besides, every farmer can 

 easily see how he can enrich his orchard measurably without cost. 

 The leaves annually cast by the bearing orchard go to replenish 

 the soil. A supplement of ashes, plaster, superphosphate of lime 

 or fine bone dust from year to year, added to the castings of the 

 sheep, and the leaves, if preserved, will be speedily returned 

 with usury. 



Similar remarks are applicable in the main to the hog. Corn 

 fed to him in the orchard is soon turned to pork, which commands 

 ready cash, and to manure, which the apple tree, by its mystic 

 power of alchemy, will readily turn to gold. The hog, too, is a 

 grazing animal. And the advantages are still greater, if it is found 

 expedient at any time, to seed the orchard to clover. Swine will 

 thrive abundantly in the summer lime on corn, clover and water, 

 with a little salt. He is a good gleaner, too, to clean up the wormy 

 and other refuse fruit, and the fragments of the leaves and roots 

 of the beets or other root crops harvested. And if the soil is kept 

 under culture, he will aid the plow by his industrious search for 

 seeds and insects in the ground, and by his efi'orts to make his bed 

 in a cool place beneath the heated surface. 



Fowls are another class of profitable assistants in the distribu- 

 tion of fertilizers in the orchard, as well as in the destruction of 

 insects. For this last service I have found ducks most useful ; 

 and no one, after trial, it is thought, will complain of them for 

 want of sufficient capacity for consumption and distribution. 



