APPLE-ORCHARDS.-NO. 3. 
331 
value ; since, if they be dwarfs, they will immedi¬ 
ately come into bearing, and will ripen their fruit 
early in the season, which can be gathered with 
great facility; and if it falls to the ground, will 
often escape from being bruised. Dwarfs, too, may 
easily be pruned, and very conveniently thinned of 
their superfluous fruit; or, they may be readily 
cleansed from every offending thing, or supplied 
with nutritious washes. On the other hand, if the 
supernumeraries be seedlings or grafts, they will be 
ready for the supply of such vacancies as will have 
occurred amongst the standards, from accident or 
disease, at the time of removal. Among other ad¬ 
vantages resulting from the wide planting of or¬ 
chards, may be mentioned the healthful and invigo¬ 
rating influence of the sun on every part of the 
trees, and thereby causing them to bring forth more 
fruit, and that which is larger, fairer, and better 
flavored; for an apple, of a globular form, three 
inches in diameter, contains twenty-seven times more 
bulk than one of an inch in diameter (globes being to 
each other as the cubes of theirdiameters). Henceap- 
ples are not to be valued by their number only, but by 
their size; and indeed, by their weight; for most 
weight must be expected where there is most juice, 
and juice will follow health and vigor.* Another im¬ 
portant advantage is, that trees planted at wide in¬ 
tervals from each other, have more room to spread, 
without the interference of their roots and branches, 
and consequently will bear a greater quantity of 
fruit. A tree w T ith a hemispherical head, fifty feet 
in diameter, will have twenty-five times as much 
fruit-bearing surface, as one of the same formed 
head ten feet in diameter. In other words, circum¬ 
stances being equal, it would produce as much fruit 
as twenty-five of the smaller trees, although it 
would occupy but little more than one-half as much 
ground. 
The usual mode of planting out trees in an 
orchard, is the square-form; but the system most 
esteemed and adopted by the ancients, was to plant 
them in quincuncem ; that is, in the form of the Ro¬ 
man numeral Y. The two modes may be illus* 
traed by the following diagrams:— 
The quincunx, when compared with the square- 
form, saves one-eighth of the ground, and has the 
advantage of disposing the trees at equal distances 
apart in every direction. The vacant spaces which 
will be left at the ends of every other row of stand¬ 
ards, may be filled with supernumerary dwarf-trees, 
and allowed to remain permanently. To plant tem¬ 
porary trees between the principal ones, so as to 
divide the distances into halves, will require about 
two supernumeraries for every principal one, by 
the square-form, and a less number by the quin¬ 
cunx-form, if dwarf-standards are allowed to re¬ 
main in the vacant spaces which occur at the ends 
of every other row. This will be more clearly un¬ 
derstood by an inspection of the diagrams below, in 
which the asterisks ($=) denote the standard-trees, (d) 
the permanent dwarfs, and (s) the supernumerary 
trees. 
j # s # s # s # 
s s s 
D # S 
s s s 
s s s 
S # D 
s s s 
< 8 ? 
Quincunx-Form.—Fig. 82 . 
The following is a practical method of laying out 
an orchard by the quincunx-form:—First, deter¬ 
mine the points for the centre of each tree in the 
outer row, by setting stakes at equal distances apart 
# 
S 
# 
S 
S 
s 
s 
& 
s 
s 
# 
s 
Square-Form.— Fig. 83 . 
—say fifty feet. Take a line one hundred feet m 
length, with a knot or mark in its middle, and 
place its two ends at two contiguous stakes; then 
* Papers of Mass. Agr. Soc., 1804, p, 85 
