PREFACE. xv 



limited ourselves to basic principles that everyone can put into practice. We won't say 

 anything at all about frames, glass panels, greenhouses, changing the quality of the soil, & 

 all of the extremely costly forms of cultivation that are available only to the very few 

 landowners wealthy enough to afford them. They have the means to get capable & 

 intelligent people who gladly will dedicate their skill & labor to satisfy the desires of those 

 who can afford to pay them. Books & information on this topic would be as useless for the 

 very rich as they would be for individuals who don't have sufficient resources for such 

 projects. 



We'll likewise avoid getting into high-level research, which would be simply 

 unrealistic. For example, several scientists have tried to analyze soils to determine their 

 fertility. Unfortunately the results of their work never have squared with reality. 



So we think that every grower should limit himself just to knowing if the ground is 

 dry or moist, hard or loose, friable or compact, sandy, loamy, or clayey. These qualities 

 can be judged sufficiently well by hand & by eye, and the fertility of the soil can be 

 determined better & more reliably by experience than by the most sophisticated analyses. 



We thought it essential to cover at some length the ordinary cultivation of fruit 

 trees in a general way: raising them, grafting, 



