1863. 



THE ILLINOIS FAEMER. 



29' 



trees in a few years take the place of what may 

 now be a young, thrifty and promising orchard. 



When Nature raises trees, she does it on her 

 own economical plan — one best calculated to give 

 health and long life to her subject. In the forest 

 we see trees shoot up their tall, mast-like trunks 

 with a ft^-w branches at their extremeties. Such 

 trees are protected by surrounding trees while the 

 forest remains ; but remove the burden of timber, 

 and how the remaining trees are rocked and shaken 

 by the wind ! How often their beautiful heads are 

 decapitated by the raging storm ! Who ever saw 

 such trees on the border of a wood lot, or standing 

 in isolated positions about fields ? Such trees, if 

 in the border of woodlands, throw out branches 

 near the ground, to shield the body of the tree 

 from storms and sunbeams. And the specimen of 

 unrivalled symmetry in the field — how low its 

 branches, and how beautifully it throws its long 

 arms abroad ! Yet these arms are not the naked 

 ones that invite disease, but all along their length, 

 they throw out little branches, from each of which 

 a clump of leaves appear to aid in furnishing the 

 tree with healthy life-blood. If these branches 

 become too numerous, or if the weaker interfere 

 with the stronger, nature prunes and casts oflF 

 what is superfluous. 



But to our fruit trees. The best specimen of an 

 apple tree we ever saw, made its head so near the 

 ground that a person can without difficulty step 

 into the lower branches, and these branches spread 

 so low that the fruit can be gathered without diffi- 

 culty by a person standing on the ground. They 

 are long branches, and the top of a tree forms a 

 symmetrical hemisphere. Neither the axe nor 

 the saw has been accessory to forming that tree- 

 head. The hand and the pruning-knife directed 

 the first starting of these branches, and here they 

 stopped, unless two combatant branches so inter- 

 fered with each other's rights that one of them 

 must be removed. This tree-top is so dense and 

 so wide, that the hot Midsummer sun cannot send 

 its fiery rays to scorch the unprotected part of the 

 tree. They fall upon its leafy head, and the warm 

 atmosphere is diffused along the trunk and among 

 the branches. No insects have ever disturbed the 

 tree, unless it were some straggling worm that so 

 far forgot the rules of propriety and honor as to 

 commence its web among its branches. And, what 

 is far better, it has never failed of a crop since it 

 commenced bearing. 



Low trees come into leaf, flower, etc., earlier 

 than tall ones. A pear tree seven feet high had 

 branches within a foot of the surface of the ground. 

 The lowest branches were in full leaf before the 

 buds on the top of the tree had developed the color 

 of the leaf. And a plum tree, with branches near 

 the ground, gave blossams on the lower branches 

 from a week to ten days earlier than they appeared 

 in the upper part of the tree. Let the difference 

 continue in the same ratio through the season, and 

 many of our fruits would be raised in much higher 

 perfection than they now are. 



We have no doubt that many of our old orchards 

 have been injured more by injudicious over-prun- 

 ing than in any other way. Tree-pruning was al- 

 most a mania. It must be done every spring. 

 The lower limb must be taken off, and that branch 

 pruned as far out as the operator darod to venture, 

 and could reach with the destructive axe. Such 



a system of tree-torturing and tree-mutilating could 

 not be otherwise than destructive. 



[Here are important truths, forcibly put. There 

 is one point that we should have made stronger, 

 and that is, that low-branched trees come into 

 bearing at an earlier age than others. We think 

 there can be no doubt at all about this ; it ought, 

 therefore, in connection with other manifest ad- 

 vantages, to determine our treatment of fruit trees. 

 We commend Mr. Bacon's remarks to serious con- 

 sideration. — £!d. Sort. 



The Great Orchards of California. 



According to the editor of the California Farm' 

 er, the orchard of Briggs & Haskell, at Marysville, 

 are on a broad scale. It would be impossible f»r 

 a stranger to form any possible conception of the 

 extent of these orchards, the immense crop daily 

 gathered, or the wonderful producing power of the 

 trees. Strange as it may appear, with all the dis- 

 astrous effects of floods, which swept away and 

 destroyed thousands of trees, burying, also, great 

 numbers, and having many buried by drift-wood,* 

 of which more than a thousand cords of peach 

 tree fire-wood will be made from the broken and 

 killed trees; yet, with all this destruction, the 

 crops of these orchards will far exceed any for- 

 mer crop. And this, too, with another singular 

 fact, that with all the energy and attention possi- 

 ble, and with about seventy men, the fruit often 

 ripens faster than it can be gathered — so much so 

 that more than ten thousand bushels will be- lost 

 in these two orchards alone. In connection with. 

 these orchards, there is the Orovile Orchard, wher«f 

 about thirty men are gathering and shipping, ini 

 like enormous quantities. . - ' -' ; "' 



That some idea may be formed of the magni- 

 tude of the business of these fruit orchards, there 

 was sent from these fruit orchards, the second week 

 in August, from sixteen to twenty tmns, or from 

 30,000 to 40,000 pounds a day, of peaches, apri- 

 cots and plums ; of which about two-thirds were 

 shipped to Sacramento and San Francisco. ^ 



We spent some time in going through these or- 

 chards, and noting the effect of the flood upon the 

 trees. In many pieces in these orchards the drift- 

 sand was piled up from two to four feet ; but where 

 the wash was only sand, no injury resulted to the 

 trees ; they were vigorous and healthy. But where 

 the deposit was a soft clay, or mixed deposit, the 

 trees were killed. In the entire orchard, among 

 the peaches, nectarines, pears and apples, where 

 the deposit was sand alone, the trees were loaded 

 with splendid fruit — the nectarines and peaches, 

 enough to load several clipper ships, the trees 

 breaking down with the fruit, and the ground cov- 

 ered with the finest nectarines we ever saw. 



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