Disfitoces (Tart. 1 low far apart shall the trees be set? Ordinary apple trees at least twenty-five feet in the home garden. Thirty-five or forty feet is the orchard rule. Peaches should stand sixteen feet apart each way. Dwarf apple or pears may be as close as eight feet. Often peaches are set between apples. They are shorten-lived and are gone before the apple trees begin to shade them. To get a dozen trees on a space fifty by sixty feet you will have to set seine of them near the boundary lines. This is legitimate, for your neighbors will take enough of the fruit that, hangs over the fences to ease your con science as to the fertility your trees steal from their soil.
Plantiny«1«y. It is a critical time.—this day of the planting, when your stakes are set, the holes dug, and the little trees assigned to their places for better or for worse. The hest way to plant a tree. with the why of each step is given in another chapter. It need not be repeated here. Every extra care bestowed on this planting is paid for by the extra vigor of the tree during its first growing season.
Orttiny hack. You nay not count the tree properly planted until you have cut hack its top. This is really best done before the plant ing. It seems a pity to any of the top,— it is so thrifty looking, but heavy top pruning is the price of success in this first year of the tree's orchard life. The roots have been severely pruned in the digging. Unless the top is cut hack correspondingly. the maimed roots will be overtaxed, and the life of the tree be endangered. Three or four short thick branches should be left at the top, above the single trunk. They are to be the large limbs.
Feediny the trees. The soil contains much plant food which the rootlets can find if only the earth remains mellow and moist. They cannot work their way into dry, hard clods. Trees can take their food from the soil only when it is dissolved in water. What won der that they languish when the soil is cracked and hardened ! We cannot dig down and crumble, those hard clods around the roots, but we can break up those at the surface. Then rains will soak down and soften the under soil. By keeping the surface soil tine and by raking it frequently, the evaporation of moisture from below may he checked, and the roots will then go on feeding without interruption.
But there inevitably collies a time NVIlell groNyth is checked because the food supply runs low. The soil may be rich, but its fertility is not inexhaustible. If the trees do not do well even Mien you keep the soil loose and line nnder them, it is prohable that they are in need of plant foods: nitrogen. phosphoric acid or potash.
Cothmercial fertilizers. Here is a chance to test commercial fer tilizers. Nitrogen will start a languishing tree into lusty growth. In the form of nitrate of soda it gives the quickest results. Phosphoric acid and potash restore the mineral elements to depleted soils.
Cover crops. A second way is less expensive than buying chemical fertilizers, but slower. It is to sow cover crops of rye, or clover.
or beans, and to turn them under while yet, green. This returns to the soil much that the plants took from it while growing, and munch that they gathered from the air. The pod-bearing plants. as peas, beans, clover, and vetch, have the power to gather nitrogen the air and to store it away in little swellings called along their roots as well as in the parts above ground. When these plants are turned under and decay, they give their nitrogen to the soil, along with their other constituents. The cover crop not only enriches the soil but it also holds it from Nvashing, and improves its physical condition. Vegetalde fibre added to the sand and clay that constitute the soil enables it to hold moisture like a sponge. Cowpeas and crimson clover are much landed as cover crops, especially in the south. They are not hardy in the northern tier of states.—there rye and other grains are sown instead. They contribute less of nitrogen but more of phosphoric acid and potash. the two important mineral plant foods. Eye is par ticularly valuable oil soddy lands where it is often at first impossible to get a stand of clover.
I'rvrninrl. Each year the tree tries to support too many branches. Its energies are dissipated. Every winter the tree top should he shaped and thinned to suit the taste of the owner. A few strung limbs saved and cut back at the tips will make a roomy, well formed, fruitful head. The subject of pruning is treated in another chapter.
&lbsegae)A1 tyric. Fruit, trees do not take 'are of themselves. They may survive neglect, but care is what brings fruit, and plenty of it. The fight against insect pests and fungous diseases must be waged industriously in the home garden as well as in the commer cial orchard. The victory pays for all the struggle.
OmPimi. There is a strange fascination about the grafting of trees —the ennobling of mongrels—the changing ((Vol of hranches from one variety to another. If one of your neighbors has 11 variety of apple that you like, cut a scion in the winter time and graft it into one of your own apple trees in the spring. In course of time, you may have a dozen or more kinds growing on a single tree ; — yellow apples and red, late and early, sour and sweet,—each sort on a branch that started as a scion a few years before. The wonder of such a tree never ceases, and it gives a variety of fruits otherwise unattainable in so small a garden.
The hwrest. To stand under one's own trees and pluck the fruit when nature has brought it to perfection—this is the final reward of all the labor and the waiting in the home garden. The grocer's best products a-re not to be compared with these. To have fruit from June to June again, — some to eat from the tree, some to give away, some to put away for winter use, and some for the casual urchin to steal,—this is the dream of the gardener come true.