I860.] 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
53 
Winter attention to the Orchard. 
The good price realized for apples, the present 
season, should lead the farmer to give his or¬ 
chard a fair chance to keep up its bearing. If 
upon new land, or rich meadow, it may bear well 
for a succession of years. But eventually it will 
want manuring, upon almost any soil. It should 
have attention every year, even if it is not ma¬ 
nured. 
Pruning should not be delayed beyond the mid¬ 
dle of this month, unless deferred until mid-sum¬ 
mer. which is a preferable season. Remove all 
dead limbs, and the small limbs that cross each 
other. An inverted umbrella is a good shape for 
the head of small trees. Remove the loose bark 
by scraping, and the scale bugs and other insects 
by washing with soft-soap and water, mixed half 
and half. Examine all the small limbs for co¬ 
coons of insects. A young orchard thrives much 
better to be cultivated and cropped with roots for 
the first five years. Manure liberally, and make 
a deep rich soil for the roots to penetrate in after 
years. Apple trees in grass ground do better for 
mulching. We have seen stone heaps made 
around them with decided advantage. But de¬ 
composed muck is better, and good compost from 
the barn cellar, a load to a tree, is better still— 
now is a good time to apply it. 
----- 9 —■-•-»- 
For the American Agriculturist. 
Training and Pruning Trees to induce 
Fruitfulness. 
Every tree planter has noticed a vast difference 
in the tendency of fruit trees to an early, or late, 
or non-bearing state. Both apple and pear trees 
are frequently seen standing only three to four 
feet high in the nursery, loaded down with fruit, 
although no attempts had been made to dwarf 
them ; while others, after having been planted 
out for years, continue to make a strong annual 
growth but disappoint their owner in fruit As a 
general thing those trees thrown into early bear¬ 
ing were checked in their growth, either in root 
dr top. The accidental laceration of the roots or 
branches, or girdling or barking the trunk will 
frequently produce this result. The fruit grower 
acts upon those hints and forces his too rapidly 
growing trees to form fruit buds. If he removes 
a narrow ring of bark, either from the trunk or 
branches, the tree receives a permanent injury al- 
thsugh it may fruit abundantly for a year or two. 
There are two meth¬ 
ods of bringing these 
rapid growing trees into 
bearing with a perma¬ 
nent. benefit rather than 
injury to the trees them¬ 
selves. One is to cut 
back the leading shoots ; 
and the other is to bend 
over the branches and 
confine them with strings 
as shown in the accom¬ 
panying engraving. The 
object in either case is 
to check the flow of sap, 
and force into fruit buds 
what would otherwise 
form leaf and shoot buds. 
This form of training is called “ quenouille,” or 
“conical,” and is mainly practiced upon the pear, 
by heading back the young tree to induce side 
shoots, which in turn are cut back moderately, 
leaving them uniform upon the different sides. 
The outer branches are now tied down to stakes 
driven in the ground, thus compressing the tubes 
or cells, which checks the flow of sap and in¬ 
duces fruit buds, instead of flowing to the extrem¬ 
ities and pushing out new wood. 
A free cutting back of the previous season’s 
growth, especially the upright or leading shoots, 
also tends to develop fruit buds and at the same 
time forms a neat compact head to the tree. 
This heading back and tying down can appro¬ 
priately be done during the mild Winter days, 
and if the tree has sufficient age, it will form buds 
the next Summer, and they in turn will develop 
into flowers and fruit the following season. * 
PEREGRINE WHITE’S APPLE 
A Jog in the Fruit Garden. 
A Farmer. —So you call this a fruit-garden, hey 1 
Why don’t you call it an orchard or a garden- 
patch, one or t'other? 
One of the Editors .—Oh, because it is a mixed 
garden, containing both vegetables and the small¬ 
er fruits. Look around here, see these beets, 
melons, dwarf-pears, dwarf-cherries, currants, 
grapes, and what not. 
Farmer. —Well, let that go. Now please tell 
me about these dwarf pears—who first thought 
of grafting a pear-tree on a quince-bush : I’d like 
to know. 
Editor .—Can't tell you, sir, nor who first prac¬ 
ticed grafting at all. There are many stories about 
it in Pliny and other ancient writers, which are 
neither true nor ingenious. If the discovery had 
occurred in our day, it would have made the man 
immortal as a great benefactor of his race. 
Farmer .—There used to be pretty good apples 
in this country, and a plenty of them too, espec¬ 
ially in New-England, before grafting was prac¬ 
ticed here. Farmers used to plow their land and 
sow apple-pomace and raise orchards from the 
seedlings. 
Editor. —Yes, and good cider was made here, 
from the very first. I have in my pocket a little 
book containing some of the laws of Plymouth 
Colony, passed in the year 1667, which show 
that apple-juice was then a common beverage. 
Let me read a few lines : 
“ It was enacted by the Court, that no person 
or persons shall sell any cyder to any Indian, un¬ 
der the penalty of ten shillings, etc. And that 
none allow any persons to spend theire time by 
tippleing any cyder, liquors, &c., in their houses; 
and that in case any cyder be found in the cus¬ 
tody of any Indians, it shall be lawfull for any 
man to take it away from them ” 
Farmer. —Yes, yes, and it would have been 
well if our forefathers had not given them the 
taste of fire-water at all. But, don’t you know 
that our ancestors raised pears, as well as ap¬ 
ples 1 Of course, you have read of the famous 
Endicott pear-tree, at Danvers, Mass , which bore 
fruit upwards of two hundred years ; and of the 
Stuyvesant pear-tree at the corner of 3d-avenue 
and 13th-street, in New-York, only about thirty 
years younger than the other, and which still 
blossoms and bears fruit. 
Editor .—Yes, I have heard of them, and seen 
the Stuyvesant tree. [Here, by the way, is a 
picture of an apple-tree planted at Plymouth by 
Peregrine White, the first child born after the 
landing of the Pilgrims. I don’t know whether it 
is standing now or not. 
It was upward of two 
hundred years old when 
this drawing was made.] 
I have noticed the grand 
old pear-trees still alive, 
which the French plant¬ 
ed along the line of the 
Lakes and down the Ohio 
River, as early as the be¬ 
ginning of the eighteenth 
century. Yes, we had 
fruits in America, before 
we had fruit-books or 
agricultural papers. Oc¬ 
casionally, in those early 
times, the newspapers 
inserted paragraphs on 
farming and gardening, 
in which many wise 
things appeared, such,for 
instance, as these : “ If 
you inoculate the stock 
of a tree with mercurial 
ointment, it will poison all the insects which in¬ 
fest it! ” So that Tyler’s calomel tree powder 
was only an old humbug revived. “ If a 
pear-scion be grafted on an apple-stock, the 
scion will gradually change into an apple 
branch and bear apples ! A cutting of an 
apple-tree will bear fruit in a very few years, if it 
is inserted in a potato and then planted ! ” All of 
which were in keeping with Virgil’s fable of 
grafting the apple on the oak, and of procuring 
a new race of bees from the carcass of an ox ! 
Farmer .—That’s what I should call “ hook¬ 
farming,” in earnest. But now, tell me why pear- 
trees don’t live as long now-a-days, as they used 
to 1 I lose several trees every year, and so do my 
neighbors, far and near. Has the climate 
changed, or is the soil worn out, or do we prune 
and manure them to death! What's the trouble? 
Editor. —Terrible hard questions, those. As to 
eur climate, doubtless the cutting oft of our for¬ 
ests has rendered it more changeable, more sub 
ject to drouth and severe storms, more windy 
and disagreeable, and more subject to extremes 
of temperature. But after all, the climate gets 
more abuse than it really deserves. Our summers 
are hotter than those in England, and our winters 
colder, but.then we beat the British in raising fine 
fruits. Cobbett, a writer on gardening, well says: 
“In America, when we see the blossom, we ex¬ 
pect the fruit will follow-, hut in England and 
France, the trees must often be covered, to pu.- 
tect them from the untimely frosts of April and 
May.” Then, again, we generally ripen tlm ap¬ 
ple, pear, peach and plum, without difficulty in 
the open air ; but in England the peach can 
hardly be ripened without careful training on 
walls, and the pear and plum are generally 
dwarfed and trained against walls and espaliers. 
So too with the more delicate sorts of apples. 
Many of our finest peaches can not he raised 
there at all. 
Farmer. —I stand up for Yankee-land, in spite 
TREE. 
