66 VITAL ACTIONS. 



they would liave expended, had they been able to 

 grow with their former vigour ; hence the nutritious 

 matter accumulates, and flower-buds are formed. In 

 this country, if a fruit tree has its crop destroyed one 

 year, it bears the more abundantly the next;* owing, 

 no doubt, to the accumulation in its system of that 

 nutritious matter which would not have been present 

 there, had the crop which was destroy^ed, been allow- 

 ed to grow : and the reverse of this is well known to 

 be the fact ; an excessive crop one year being follow- 

 ed by a scanty crop the succeeding year. So, when 

 a young seedling fruit tree is made to bear prema- 



* The " bearing year" of tlie apple orchards, all over this country, 

 is a "well known popular illustration of this remark. This arises 

 simply from the tendency in the apple, when left to itself, to bear 

 such large crops one year, as to require the next year to recover 

 eufScient strength to bear again. This becomes a kind of fixed 

 constitutional habit in a given variety, and is continued by grafting, 

 BO that whole orchards bear one year, and are unfruitful the nextj 

 •with great regularity. On the other hand, certain sorts, like the 

 Bellflower and Holland pippin, which bear but moderate crops, in 

 strong soils bear every year. A. J. D. 



The habit itself may be corrected or changed, when the tree or 

 orchard is young, by picking off all the fruit that sets the first year 

 the tree bears a good crop, and thus forcing it to take its bearing 

 year the next season. In parts of the country where the " apple 

 year" is pretty uniformly the same in all the orchards, we have known 

 clever orchardist8 to increase their profits by thus inducing their 

 young orchards to take the barren year of the country around for their 

 fruitful one, and the habit once formed the tree will continue it. In 

 a garden where the cost of labor is not so much an object, apple trees 

 may have half their fruit regularly thinned-off when they are as 

 large as bullets, by which process the tree wiU not exhaust itself 

 and will bear a moderate crop the next year. A. J. D. 



