1. There is a great deal more pruning done than is needful or healthful. Our hot summers and strong growth of wood make every leaf on the tree precious. Dead limbs should be taken out. Where the tree is really tangled with wood, thin out. Where branches are rubbing across each other severely, take off one of them. Grub up every water-sprout from the roots. If you can avoid it, do not use them for trees, for the tree thus obtained will inherit the same propensity of sending up water-shoots. Sometimes, in scarcity of stock, they are used rather than to have none, but it is then only a lesser of two evils.
2. Time of Pruning.—There is a bad practice abroad of pruning before the leaves are out. English books direct to
prune in February, and we suspect that the custom sprang up at the East from the old country example. It is not safe for us to follow the specific processes of Great Britain or the Continent. Our own well settled experience is to be our rule of practice.
There is no better month in the year to prune, than that month in which the tree is making the most wood. It is plain that the sooner a wound heals the better; and equally plain, that a tree which is growing will heal a wound quicker than an inactive tree. All the matter which goes to form wood, or to form the granulations by which a cut heals, comes from the downward current of sap, or sap which has been elaborated in the leaf. Of course when the tree has the most leaves, and the leaves are preparing the greatest quantity of proper juice or elaborated sap, that is the time for pruning, because the time for healing. In this climate we have preferred the last of May for spring pruning, and the last of August for summer pruning—the exact week varying as the season is forward or backward.
3. Instead of Pruning at this early period, let Trees be thoroughly Scraped and Scoured.—A three-sided scraper, such as butchers use to clean their blocks with, or any convenient implement, may be applied to the trunk and large branches with force sufficient to take off the dry, dead bark. Only this is to be removed. Take soft soap and reduce it by urine to the consistence of paint. With a stiff shoe-brush rub the whole trunk and the limbs as far up as is practicable. The bark will grow smooth and glossy; insect eggs will be entirely destroyed; all moss and fungous vegetation removed, and the bark stimulated and made healthier. This is better than any whitewash, and just as convenient.
4. Lime is better used as follows: remove the earth from the trunk, and put about half a peck to each tree. Every spring, spread and dig in the old lime, and put new in its place. Unleached ashes are good to be dug in around a
tree. If your soil is calcareous, full of lime, these applications are not needful. Thoroughly rotted manure, or better yet, black vegetable mold may be dug in liberally, and will supply the soil with nutriment, and the roots will find their way in with great facility.
5. When a tree is manured, remember that the ends only of the roots take up nourishment, and that the ends of the roots are not found close by the trunk. We often see heaps of manure piled about the trunk, and the ends of the roots are three yards or more distant from it. You might as well put your fodder down at your cattle’s hind legs, and wonder that they did not get fat on it. Treat your trees as you do your stock—put their food where their mouths are. Young orchards are better without stimulating manure. Let the soil be mellowed, and then give the trees their own time, and if they do not bear quite as soon, they will live longer and be less subject to disease.