AGRICULTURE. 185 
and the price of fruit rapidly falling from year to year; the 
trunk is shaded, and protected against the disease called the 
sun-scald; the earth about the roots is kept moist; and the 
trees are protected against the wind. 
1 The trees are planted from one-sixth to one-half nearer to- 
gether in the orchards than in the Eastern states. This is an 
additional protection against sun and wind. The ground is 
ploughed several times every summer, and kept clean; whereas 
in the Eastern orchards it is common to sow grass or cultivate 
vegetables. Our apple-trees are free from the borers after the 
first year, and our plum and cherry trees from the curculio, 
though the plum suffers from the aphis or louse. 
Fruit-trees in California are generally as large at two years 
old as they are in New York at three and four years. The in- 
stances of unusually rapid growth here are without parallel 
elsewhere. Cherry-trees have grown to be fourteen feet high 
in one year; pear-trees ten feet high; peach-trees to have 
trunks from two to three inches in diameter. These were all 
from buds on yearling stocks, and were well provided with 
branches—not trimmed to gain height. These specimens of 
rapid growth were observed on an island near the junction of 
the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. At Petaluma, a 
cherry-tree two years old from the graft, and three from the 
seed, had a trunk seven inches and three-quarters round; a 
plum-tree, three years from the seed, was eleven feet high, and 
had a trunk seven inches in circumference; and a peach-tree, 
one year from the bud, was eight feet high and eight and a 
half inches round. 
Mr. E. B. Crocker, of Sacramento, wrote thus in December, 
1858: “In January, 1855, I planted a small almond-tree, with 
a stem little larger than a goosequill, and which I cut down 
within a few inches of the ground. It is now a tree twenty 
feet high, sixteen feet through the top, with branches starting 
from the surface of the earth. The body below the branches 
is twenty-four inches in circumference. .... A Glout Morceau 
dwarf pear-tree, planted in 1855, when it had grown one year 
g* 
