152 NEBRASKA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



there has been a great amount of ignorance regarding this subject. 

 It is quite true that many people have filed on timber claims and 

 expended considerable money and have not met with encouraging 

 success. 



A careful study of this subject, and an experience of planting more 

 than 6,000,000 trees on timber claims in western Nebraska and Colo- 

 rado, leads me to feel that the difficulties described in the article noted 

 above are almost wholly due to the ignorance of the proper methods 

 of tree planting, and to a bad choice with which to plant rather than 

 to our climatic difficulties. 



There is no question but that forest trees can be raised with very 

 much less moisture than would be required for raising corn, even for 

 raising corn stalks without ears, and that there is very little area, if 

 any, east of the Rocky mountains, where nature does not give moist- 

 ure enough, if properly handled, to raise forest trees under the timber 

 culture act. We have, in our experience, achieved excellent success in 

 growing trees without a particle of aid from irrigation, on the high 

 and dry tables of western Nebraska and eastern Colorado, where the 

 soil had not been wet down more than eighteen inches, and where the 

 annual rainfall did not exceed eight inches. We feel sure that most of 

 the troubles, so aptly described by the paper in question, were due 

 rather to the planting of seed and river-pulled trees, on ground im- 

 properly prepared and not sufficiently cultivated, than to any insur- 

 mountable difficulties in the way. We find that to achieve success we 

 must thoroughly prepare the ground. It should be plowed about 

 twice as deep as the average western farmer plows his soil — say not 

 less than eight or nine inches — and it should be thoroughly pulver- 

 ized that it may retain moisture; that the trees should be nursery- 

 grown and of the best grade, to be carefully planted and so thoroughly 

 cultivated as not to allow the moisture to be dissipated between. Us- 

 ing these precautions we have no difficulty in securing an average 

 stand, averaging more than three times the amount required by the 

 rulings of the department. Sometimes we attain an average stand 

 for an entire season of three and a half times the amount required by 

 the department, or from eighty-five to ninety per cent of all the trees 

 planted, planting 28,000 trees on each timber claim. These growing 

 trees and this cultivated surface catches more of the rainfall, lodges 

 more of the drifting snow, which, melting, soaks deeper into the sub- 



