June 24, 1896.] 



Garden and Forest. 



259 



Meetings of Societies. 

 The So-called Exhaustion of Nursery Lands. 



THE most vital question with nurserymen at the present 

 time is that of the unproductiveness of lands which 

 have grown one crop of trees. All nurserymen declare 

 that one crop of fruit-tree stock cannot immediately follow 

 another with any assurance of success. This important 

 question received serious consideration in an address by 

 Professor L. H. Bailey before the American Association of 

 Nurserymen at Indianapolis last year, in the tenth report of 

 the New York State Experiment Station and in Bulletins 

 102 and 103 of the Cornell Station. Professor Bailey dis- 

 cussed the subject more specifically at the meeting of the 

 Nurserymen's Association in Chicago, on the nth instant, 

 and some of the points which he made are here given : 



a. THE FERTILITY OF THE SOIL. 



There are two analytical means of determining the fertility 

 of the land. One method determines the chemical constitu- 

 tion, and the other the mechanical or physical condition. 



Chemistry determines the amount and kind of plant-food in 

 the soil, but it cannot tell just how useful this food may be to 

 the plant. This depends upon the physical condition of the 

 land, or upon the relation of the soil to warmth, moisture, air 

 and mechanical constitution. The plant is not simply a passive 

 agent, taking in the food which is presented to it, but it is 

 actively engaged in searching for and appropriating food. 



The actual fertility of the soil depends, therefore, upon the 

 plant as well as upon the land. The better and more com- 

 fortable the plant, the more food it can appropriate from a 

 given soil ; hence that soil is practically the richer. The 

 chemist does not determine the physical conditions which 

 make the plant comfortable and active. In other words, the 

 amount of plant-food in the soil is only one of the elements in 

 the fertility of the land. 



In most instances as much depends upon the physical con- 

 dition of the soil as upon its chemical constitution, and in 

 many cases even more depends upon it. 



Soil is derived from two sources — rock and organic matter. 

 Each is essential to it. Without the rock matter it would lose 

 body and staying qualities. Without the organic matter it 

 would lose life or heat and activity. 



Nature adds the organic matter to the soil by growing plants 

 upon it and then incorporating their remains with it. Every- 

 where the process of soil-building is now going on. The longer 

 the soil is in crops the richer it becomes, although the relative 

 amount of mineral matter which it contains is decreasing at 

 the same time. 



Nature makes the soil richer, then, both by fining and digest- 

 ing the mineral matter and by ameliorating its physical condi- 

 tion through the incorporation of humus or organic matter. 



This fining process must ultimately cease, but the addition 

 of humus never ceases. The final and complete enrichment 

 of the soil, therefore, must come largely as the result of the 

 incorporation of humus with it. 



The chief value of this humus is not to directly afford plant- 

 food, but to improve the conditions of temperature, moisture, 

 aeration and the like. 



b. man's treatment of the land. 



Man's chief desire is to remove organic matter from the 

 soil. He consumes the plant product. As a consequence, 

 cultivated soils soon tend to become hard, dense, heavy and 

 lifeless, and the more clay-like the land the more pronounced 

 is the result. 



The best and richest farm soils are those which are loamy — 

 that is, those which are friable, soft and dark-colored. This 

 loamy condition is brought about by the addition of stable- 

 manures and green crops. 



Every ordinary soil tends to lose its humus sooner than its 

 plant-food, and most so-called exhausted soils are injured in 

 their physical condition rather than exhausted of their fertility. 



It follows, therefore, that the addition of mere plant-food 

 cannot entirely restore the generality of worn-out lands. The 

 physical condition must always receive first attention. The 

 addition of commercial fertilizers is not a fundamental correc- 

 tive of poor lands in the vast majority of cases. It should be 

 considered as a supplement to the treatment of the land by 

 means of tillage and cropping. 



If man's reward from the cultivation of the land is so unlike 

 nature's, it follows that one cannot copy the practices of nature 

 in the treatment of the land. Yet, in every generation, there 



are men who proclaim that because nature neither plows nor 

 tills, therefore man should not. The only infallible guide to the 

 proper treatment of the soil is experience, not science, nor 

 speculation ; but science explains the laws and directs the 

 application of them when once experience has discovered 

 them. 



In fact, experience is law, for experience that persists is that 

 which gives consecutively uniform results under like condi- 

 tions. All experience proves that frequent tillage and the 

 addition of humus quickly and invariably ameliorate and 

 improve the soil. It is folly to attempt to controvert the facts 

 by mere speculation. On the other hand, experience proves 

 that the addition of chemical fertilizers does not invariably 

 visibly benefit the soil ; therefore the value of such applica- 

 tions must depend upon local or transient conditions. 



C. THE NURSERY LANDS. 



The best nursery lands, at least in New York state, are those 

 which contain much clay. This soil is the most easily injured 

 by unwise or careless treatment and by the loss of organic 

 matter. 



The nursery crop occupies the land for three to five years. 

 During all this time the land receives no addition of organic 

 matter, and finally even the roots are taken out of it. In very 

 many cases the trees are planted and dug when the soil is wet 

 or very dry, and, therefore, quickly and very seriously injured 

 in its "grain," or its physical condition. 



Nurserymen find that if the land is rested in Clover orGrass for 

 a few years it will again grow trees. This rotation, like all others, 

 is a means of ameliorating the physical condition of the soil 

 as well as the chemical condition of it. A part of the rotation 

 must aim at the incorporation of humus. Therefore every 

 famous rotation has a rest crop in it. 



An incidental advantage of any rotation is the variety of till- 

 age imposed by it. A rotation of tools and of methods, and 

 seasons of working the land, is often as important as the other 

 results of alternate cropping. 



[Extended figures of chemical analyses of nursery stock 

 were presented, showing that the amounts of potash, phos- 

 phoric acid and nitrogen which such stock removes from the 

 land is really very small, and less than that removed by simi- 

 lar bulk or weight of corn or wheat. Experiments now being 

 made by Professor Bailey were cited, and these showed that 

 the addition of concentrated or chemical manures to nursery- 

 lands does not promise very important results ; but Professor 

 Bailey has greater hopes from experiments in the sowing of 

 Crimson Clover and other cover crops in the nursery rows, 

 and in the use of stable-manures. He cited instances of excel- 

 lent results following the addition of stable-manure to nursery- 

 lands between the trees in the fall ; an instance was given of 

 a piece of land so treated which has grown excellent Plum- 

 trees for twenty consecutive years. Examples were also given 

 to show that there is no necessary reason why nursery "stock 

 should not follow nursery stock as well as wheat follow 

 wheat, except that the land is usually more clay-like, the rota- 

 tion or cropping is longer, and the addition of humus or fibre 

 to the soil is less.] 



d. THE CONCLUSIONS. 



The difficulty then is not one of amount of plant-food, so 

 much as of the availability of that food by improving the phy- 

 sical conditions of the soil. The soil must be warm, soft, 

 mellow, and the plant must be comfortable. 



The trouble is, not that nursery trees take so much from the 

 soil, but that the rotation is too long, the fibre is burned out of 

 the soil, and much of the working of the land is untimely. 



Certain lands are not readily injured by nursery cultivation, 

 and these may grow several continuous crops of trees. 



Now and then the nurseryman can augment the growth of 

 his stock by extra attention to tillage (it is assumed that he 

 always tills well) and by the addition of some quick nitrogen 

 compound, as nitrate of soda ; but these are generally only 

 temporary correctives. The complete or fundamental cor- 

 rective for nursery-land is rotation ; but the length of this 

 rotation may often be shortened, or even entirely reduced by 

 the judicious intracultural use of stable manures and cover 

 crops. 



The conclusion was made that the physical condition of the 

 soil is a subject of greater or earlier importance than its 

 chemical constitution ; that the value of rotation of crops lies 

 largely in its ameliorating effect upon the physical condition ; 

 and that nursery-lands are no exception in demanding such 

 rotation. Instead of thinking it strange that trees do nol readily 

 follow trees, we should rather think it strange it they did. 

 Because the crop is of several years' duration, it becomes 

 necessary that the alternating cropping should also be 



