New Hampshire Journal Of Agriculture

Pruning.

Correspondence of the Journal of Agriculture.

Mr. Editor: A word about pruning may not be out of place as this is the season of the year when fruit-growers and nurserymen generally attend to it. Many authors, however, say it should be done later in the season, when the tree is full of leaf; and others recommend the fall as the more proper time. I prefer the spring, as this is the time for grafting, the pruning can then be more conveniently attended to, and as safely performed, in my belief, as at any season of the year. But the manner how the thing should be done, is the question I propose to discuss, not the time when. My motto is, prune sparingly and skillfully. Young trees should be the subjects, and a pocket-knife and fine saw, the only tools. The small tender tree should not be deprived of all its lower limbs and stripped of half its foliage, leaving a long, naked trunk exposed to the burning rays of a summer's sun, and looking more like a corn stalk, than an apple tree.

Such a tree is an unsightly object; possessing neither beauty nor utility. Let the limbs come out rather low down, say from three to five feet from the ground, then you will have a large, wide spread top; a tree of good symmetrical form, and capable of producing an abundant crop. Do not cut out much wood from the tops of your trees as they advance in years, nor pluck off all the twigs and small shoots, leaving the limbs as bare as pitch-forks, under the delusion that your fruit will be more "fair and fine." In order to obtain large yields and good fruit, you must have strong and healthy trees. A tree robbed of the limbs and leaves which nature has provided for its covering, will sicken and die as surely as if nature's laws had been violated in the removal of too large a share of its roots.

If any considerable wound is made on your tree by pruning or otherwise, so that it will not heal over the same season, grafting wax, or some other adhesive composition, should be immediately applied. Great care should also be exercised in ascending your trees, for grafting, pruning, or gathering fruit, that the tender bark is not bruised or peeled from the limbs by your thick boots.

There is a good specimen of an apple tree in Warner Village, that was grafted when quite small, about forty years ago, with the variety called the Ram's Horn. The trunk of the tree is not more than four feet from the ground to the large under branches, which extend out from 16 to 20 feet on all sides. The top of this tree is full of large, healthy boughs, and in the summer season is clothed with rich, deep green foliage. Last fall forty bushels of large, showy, fine flavored apples were gathered from it. This tree possesses life, vigor and value. It is almost an orchard of itself. It has never undergone the severe ordeal of a modern pruning.

Large trees should not be pruned, except for the removal of dead and diseased branches—when the hand-saw and axe may perhaps be used, but for all other purposes of pruning, these heavy instruments should be discarded.

The fatal practice of chopping off large growing branches and sawing out big limbs from our apple trees, so as to "let the sun in," has made sad havoc with some of our orchards, and many farmers now lament the folly of such a course. But this excessive, injudicious slashing away at our orchards is now much abated, and soon is, I trust, to be entirely abandoned, for a more safe and rational practice.

H.

Warner, April, 1861.