31© 
'THIS RURAL? NEW-YORKER 
March 1, 
A MOWING MACHINE THAT “KICKS.” 
Mr. S. M. Martin, of Prince Edward 
Island, has devised the mower attach¬ 
ment shown in cut below. As will be 
seen, a set of tedder forks is attached 
to the rear of the mower so that they 
kick out as the machine moves along. 
Thus instead of being left flat on the 
ground the swath is kicked or stirred 
up so that the air easily works under 
and through it. Farmers who work in 
damp climates or in “catchy” weather 
well know the value of a good hay 
tedder. It shakes up the swath, breaks 
some of the stems and gives the air a 
better chance to work under. As hay is 
“cured” by the air rather than by the 
figures to find the annual waste in al¬ 
lowing these trees to die. 
I have drained a good many apple 
orchards in different parts of the Lake 
Ontario belt, and where there has been 
much loss of trees it has invariably de¬ 
veloped that the dying began after 20 
years from planting. In one 46-acre 
orchard in Oswego Co., where there 
had been a loss of 500 trees, a former 
owner said that the trees did fairly 
well until past 25 years of age. We 
get, hovyever, but a distorted view. of 
the office of drainage in an orchard 
when we consider only the facts where 
the trees die outright, for there are 
many degrees of difference in damage 
to trees by water between those on a 
well-drained soil and those on a soil 
too wet for them to exist, and the dis¬ 
tress signals are more or less plain 
TEDDER ATTACHMENT TO MOWING MACHINE. 
sun, the more the hay is tossed up the 
better chance the air has at it. This 
“kick-up” behind the mower shakes the 
hay right after cutting and saves the 
work of an extra team. It seems to be 
a practical contrivance. 
DRAINAGE IN AFPLE ORCHARD 
CONSERVATION. 
A great deal is being said about “con¬ 
servation of natural resources,” and 
much is being done, by our government 
and by individuals as well, to stop the 
waste that has always been a part of 
our industrial life. Edward Burke once 
said in effect that before any great gen¬ 
eral change took place in the affairs of 
man the thought of that change became 
general in the minds of all men—in the. 
air as it were—and the air at this time 
seems full of the“Brandeis planof stop¬ 
ping waste.” We have our Forestry 
Bureau, our Water Power Commission 
and National reclamation projects, etc., 
and a few fruit growers are thinking 
that it is wasteful to let apple trees die 
from wet feet at the age of 30 or 40 
years (and many times at an earlier 
age) when just a small part of the pro¬ 
ceeds of our season’s crop invested in 
drains, would give them a chance to 
be fruitful for a century. 
We drained our orchard last season, 
not a mile from Lake Ontario, where 
there were a few Baldwin and Green¬ 
ing patriarchs past the century mark, 
standing with their load of fruit among 
the upstarts of a third generation that 
had been planted in vacancies where 
it was too wet for their predecessors to 
live their allotted years. This Winter 
I made a survey for the same man of 
another orchard (all Baldwins) that we 
are to drain this coming season; this 
orchard was planted 38 years ago; a 
block of 342 trees, of which there re¬ 
main about three hundred. Their fruit 
sold for $4,000 at picking time with the 
low price of 1912. Suppose that orchard 
had been drained before the trees be¬ 
gan dying, and instead of 40 vacancies 
there were 40 more trees of fruit bring¬ 
ing $13.33 per tree, as did the rest of 
the orchard. We will be generous 
enough to charge the 40 trees $1 per 
rod for the 80 rods of drains that 
would have been required to bring them 
all under the influence of the drains. 
It will not take much of a conjurer of 
according to. the degree of wetness of 
soil or individual hardiness of the tree. 
It may be a paleness of foliage, dwarfed 
growth, or in place of thrifty scions, 
a top scraggy with fruit spurs. A 
water-soaked soil could cause any or 
all of the above symptoms, besides leav¬ 
ing the tree, as Prof. Fippin once said, 
with diminished strength for its fight 
with fungi and insect enemies. Aside 
from the consideration of helping the 
tree directly by soil improvement, which 
drainage accomplishes, there is the im¬ 
portant point that all the operations of 
spraying, tilling and harvesting are 
brought more under the control of the 
grower. 
More than once has the writer been 
told by owner or manager (the season 
following the draining of an orchard) 
“We sprayed that drained portion be¬ 
fore we could get onto the high ground 
that zuas considered dry enough with¬ 
out draining.” Referring again to the 
two Oswego Co. orchards before men¬ 
tioned the owner says that during the 
wet harvest of last Fall the barrels 
stood in water in many places in the 
undrained orchard, and loaded wagons 
sank in nearly hub deep, while in the 
orchard drained that season the ground 
was firm everywhere. At times during 
the spraying season, this being able to 
get on the ground becomes a mighty big 
factor toward making the grower master 
of the situation and will have more and 
more to do with controlling tillage 
operations as heavy tractors come into 
more general use, as they are sure to 
do in the near future. 
It is often urged, as an argument 
against draining, that there is liable to 
be a time before the season is finished 
when the water removed by the drains 
win be needed. Now to those who think 
that drains‘diminish the supply of mois¬ 
ture in times of the trees’ need, let it 
be said that drains only remove the 
water that gravitates to them and mois¬ 
ture used by plants has no regard for 
the law of gravity, but is held by sur¬ 
face tension to the soil particles, and 
moves in any direction by capillary at¬ 
traction. One of the direct results of 
drainage is through better aeration to 
make the particles smaller, thereby in¬ 
creasing the soil’s capacity for fine 
moisture. Not only has this been a 
long-established fact of science, but 
growers themselves have found drain¬ 
age to be the greatest help of any single 
farm practice in controlling the ill ef¬ 
fects of drought. No farm improve¬ 
ment will pay larger returns on the in¬ 
vestment than will drains between all 
the rows of trees in a well managed 
apple orchard on a clay soil. 
J. F. VAN SCHOONHOVEN. 
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