442 Report oF tHE HORTICULTURAL DEPARTMENT OF THE 
vate one or two times; 92, three or four times; 69, five or six 
times; 29, seven or eight times; 6, nine or ten times; while one 
man tills twelve, two fourteen and two other enthusiasts fif- 
teen times. Of the 370 men who cultivate, 224 use cover crops 
yearly; 132 use them only occasionally or not at all but plow 
under early green manuring crops or stable manure. 
Of the men who have their orchards in sod, 324 pasture the 
land more or less. Of these 89 keep sheep alone in the orchard; 
98, hogs; 380, cows; 62, hogs and sheep; while 45 use some 
combination of hogs, sheep, cows and horses. Of the 71 men 
who have sodded orchards but do not pasture them, 65 take 
either a yearly or an occasional crop of hay from the orchard. 
Of the orchards in sod 122 are given fall and winter dressings 
of stable manure; on 39 the practice is to cut the grass as 
mulch; on 24 stable manure, straw, cornstalks or other organic 
matter is used as a regular summer mulch; on 52 no mulch is 
applied. 
Of the total number who replied, 569 growers say they use 
stable manure or commercial fertilizers in their orchards; 54 
do not use fertilizers. 
From the expressions made by the correspondents in this 
survey it is certain that the tendency in New York among apple 
growers is strongly toward tillage. Many of those who grow 
apples in sod express the conviction that the trees would do 
better under tillage but because of particular conditions they 
feel that they must keep their orchards in sod. Thus the 
statement was many times made that time could not be found 
to till, spray and take care of field or garden crops. Others 
were forced to keep the orchard in sod for the sake of the 
pasturage. . A few, but they were so few as to be a negligible 
quantity, did not till because their land was so hilly or rocky 
that it could not be tilled. There were many cases in which 
the orchardist believed that his trees grew better in sod than 
under tillage. A careful study was made of these cases; few 
of them were in the commercial apple belts of either eastern 
or western New York where high cultivation is the rule. 
Many of the advocates of sod had deep soils, or soils retentive 
