444 ReporRT OF THE. HORTICULTURAL DEPARTMENT OF THE 
tillage is impossible. These are the exception, not the rule, 
and the results obtained in the Auchter orchard may not apply 
to them. 
The question of individual expediency must be wholly elimi- 
nated in applying the results of this investigation. It may be 
profitable for a dairyman or a general farmer not competing 
with commercial fruit growers to pasture his orchard, or for 
lack of time neglect tilling it, even though it is not best for his 
trees. In a small home plantation sod makes the orchard a 
place of greater convenience for farm and family than does 
tillage. But these are matters of expediency, not of orchard 
practice. 
PREVIOUS INVESTIGATIONS. 
Much has been written on tillage and sod for the apple but 
the two methods have rarely been tried side by side for com- 
parative results. Out of a great number of reports and discus- 
sions of the subject, only the following seem entitled to be 
called investigations: 
THE WOBURN EXPERIMENT. 
At the Woburn Experimental Fruit Farm, Ridgemont, Eng- 
land, experiments with trees in sod and under tillage have been 
carried on for the past thirteen years and have been reported 
upon from time to time by the experimenters.’ The Third 
Report of the Woburn Farm is a treatise on The Effect of 
Grass on the Apple Tree in which the methods employed, the 
results obtained and the causes of the effects of grass on trees 
are very fully discussed. The conclusions of the Woburn Farm 
investigators as to effects are as follows: 
“As to the general effect produced by grass on young apple 
trees, the results of the last few years have brought forward 
nothing which can in any way modify our previous conclu- 
sions as to the intensely deleterious nature of this effect, and 
1 First, Second, Third and Fifth Reports of the Woburn Experimenta] 
Fruit Farm. 
' ?Third Report of the Woburn Experimental Fruit Farm, 1903:4. 
