The Morning News

Orchard Wisdom.
If orchards are to be made profitable they must receive as good care as other crops. Good drainage, natural or artificial, is essential to success. Trees are impatient of wet feet.
Good tillage increases the available food supply of the soil and also conserves its moisture.
Tillage should be begun just as soon as the ground is dry enough in the spring, and should be repeated as often as once in ten days throughout the growing season, which extends from spring until July or August.
Only cultivated crops should be allowed in orchards early in the season. Grain and hay should never be grown. Even hoed or cultivated crops may rob the trees of moisture and fertility if they are allowed to stand above the tree roots. Cultivators are the best crop to raise in an orchard.
Watch a sod orchard. It will begin to fall before you know it. Probably nine-tenths of the apple orchards are in sod, and many of them are meadows. Of course, they are failing. The remedy for these apple failures is to cut down many of the orchards. For the remainder the treatment is cultivation, fertilizing, spraying-the trinity of orthodox apple-growing.
Potash is the chief fertilizer to be applied to fruit trees, particularly after they come into bearing. Potash may be had in wood ashes and muriate of potash. It is most commonly used in the latter form. An annual application of potash should be made upon bearing orchards, 500 pounds to the acre.
Phosphoric acid is the second important fertilizer to be applied artificially to orchards. Of the plain superphosphates from 300 to 500 pounds may be applied to the acre.
Nitrogen can be obtained cheapest by means of thorough tillage (to promote nitrification) and nitrogenous green manures. Barn manures are generally more economically used when applied to farm crops than when applied to orchards, yet they can be used with good results, particularly when rejuvenating old orchards.
Cultivation may be stopped late in the season and a crop can then be sown upon the land. This crop may serve as a cover or protection to the soil and as a green manure.
A green manure improves the soil by adding fiber to it and by increasing its fertility.
The crops well adapted to this late sowing are few. Vetch is probably the best which has been well tested. But everything points to crimson clover as the ideal orchard cover and green manure.- Prof. Bailey.