Winter fruit should be allowed to hang on the trees until fully mature, but must be picked before it mellows and before heavy freezing weather comes. After picking, it should be put in a place with an even, low temperature. On the farm this may be in a north shed, the north side of a high building, or a cellar, where the temperature has been lowered by opening the windows on frosty nights and closing them during the day, or by a quantity of cracked ice and salt (ice-cream freezing mixture). A half-ton of ice and fifty pounds of salt will cool a large space down to a good keeping temperature for most fruits. This temperature in the North can be kept low by closing the doors and windows during the day and opening them at night, when the outside temperature is lower than that inside.
Dwarf fruit trees.
Pear trees are prevented from growing large by being budded on quince stocks. Apples are dwarfed by being worked on paradise or doucin stocks (small-stature forms of apple tree). Dwarfs occupy less space than standard or free stocks, usually come into bearing earlier, but they require more care in pruning, spraying and thinning. Dwarf pears are often grown commercially, but dwarf apples are not yet planted for profit in this country. Any variety of apple may be grown on the dwarf stocks ; but inasmuch as apple-dwarfing is a home garden practice, only good dessert varieties should be grown. Dwarf pears may be planted ten to twenty feet apart, depending on how closely they are kept headed in. About one rod asunder each way is the usual distance. Apples on doucin (Fig. 383) may be given such distances ; those on para dise stocks may be set at half these distances. All dwarfs should be started low and kept well headed back. Paradise-stock apple trees should be little more than bushes, or they may be trained as espa liers or cordons. [For further information, see Waugh's "Dwarf Fruit Trees," New York, 1906, and Bailey's "Pruning-Book."] Small-fruits.
The average farmer's family consumes less of the small cultivated fruits than the average city or village family, notwithstanding the advantages they have for producing fruit of the best quality, and that may be used in a fresh, ripe condition.
The strawberry. —The strawberry is especially adapted to growth in the home garden, and is of the greatest importance from the fact that a crop can be secured in a little over a year from plant ing. Its yield per acre is equal to that of the apple in quantity. We may expect to secure 5,000 to
15,000 quarts to the acre, or 50 to 150 barrels, which, with apple trees 40 x 40 feet apart, making about thirty trees to the acre, would be three to five barrels per tree, which is above the yearly average.
For the largest and best returns from small fruits it is best to plant on new land. The straw berry is fruited by most growers only one or two seasons, and after the fruit has been gathered the plants and mulch are plowed under. The land is then devoted to some crop, such as celery or late cabbage, that may be planted after the middle of July. New land, old pasture or clover sod, is planted with potatoes or some other hoed crop to get rid of the white grub (larva of the May beetle). The following spring straw berry plants are set as early as the land will work up fine and mellow. Some growers further prepare land of this kind by sowing a crop of peas and barley after the potatoes ; or sufficient organic matter may be incorporated by plowing under a heavy dressing of manure in the fall. Thorough cultivation must be practiced and all weeds kept down from the time the plants are set until the ground freezes in the fall.
In the North the beds must be protected in winter from freezing and thawing. A covering of straw, old hay, coarse, strawy manure, pine needles or other light material, put on just before severe freezing weather, will serve. Only a light covering, two or three inches thick, is needed, just enough to shade the ground, as the injury comes from the tearing action on the roots and crowns by freezing and thawing, and the lifting of the plants out of the ground.
Raspberry and two bush fruits do best in a rather moist, loamy soil, al though they may be grown successfully on any soil that contains a good quantity of organic mat ter, if the surface is kept fine and mellow dur ing the entire season, and especially in hot, dry weather. Plantations are generally renewed after growing six to ten years in one place, although under favorable conditions they sometimes last longer. The best time for planting is in the early fall, root-cutting plants being better than those from suckers, although the latter are more frequently used.
They are grown in hills or in rows, the former requiring a stake at each hill, or low-training of the bushes by top pruning to make them branch low and thus stand without supports. Cultivation may be done with the horse both ways, when the hill-method is used.