In my own hilly, rocky, often boggy, Westchester—probably within six of being the oldest Agricultural County in the Union—I am confident that ten thousand acres might to-morrow be given back to forest with profit to the owners and advantage to all its inhabitants. It is a fruit-growing, milk-producing, truck-farming county, closely adjoining the greatest city of the New World; hence, one wherein land can be cultivated as profitably as almost anywhere else—yet I am satisfied that half its surface may be more advantageously devoted to timber than to grass or tillage. Nay; I doubt that one acre in a hundred of rocky land—that is, land ribbed or dotted with rocks that the bar or the rock-hook cannot lift from their beds, and which it will not as yet pay to blast—is now tilled to profit, or ever will be until it shall be found advisable to clear them utterly of stone breaking through or rising within two feet of the surface. The time will doubtless arrive in which many fields will pay for clearing of stone that would not to-day; these, I urge, should be given up to wood now, and kept wooded until the hour shall have struck for ridding them of every impediment to the steady progress of both the surface and the subsoil plow.
Were all the rocky crests and rugged acclivities of this County bounteously wooded once more, and kept so for a generation, our floods would be less injurious, our springs unfailing, and our streams more constant and equable; our blasts would be less bitter, and our gales less destructive to fruit; we should have vastly more birds to delight us by their melody and aid us in our not very successful war with devouring insects; we should grow peaches, cherries, and other delicate fruits, which the violent caprices of our seasons, the remorseless devastations of our visible and invisible insect enemies, have all but annihilated; and we should keep more cows and make more milk on two-thirds of the land now devoted to grass than we actually do from the whole of it. And what is true of Westchester is measurably true of every rural county in the Union.
I have said that I believe in cutting trees as well as in growing them; I have not said, and do not mean to say, that I believe in cutting everything clean as you go. That was once proper in Westchester; it is still advisable in forest-covered regions, where the sun must be let in before crops can be grown; but, in nine cases out of ten, timber should be thinned or culled out rather than cut off; and, for every tree taken away, at least two should be planted or set out.
We have pretty well outgrown the folly of letting every apple-tree bear such fruit as it will; though in the orchard of my father's little farm in Amherst, N. H., whereon I was born, no tree had ever been grafted when I bade adieu to it in 1820; and I presume none has been to this day. By this time, almost every farmer realizes that he can't afford to grow little, gnarly, villainously sour or detestably bitter-sweet apples, when, by duly setting a graft at a cost of two dimes, he may make that identical tree yield Greenings or Pippins at least as bounteously. I presume the cumulative experience of fifty or sixty generations of apple-growers has ripened this conclusion. Why do they not infer readily and generally that growing indifferent timber where the best and most valued would grow as rapidly, is a stupid, costly blunder? It seems to me that whoever has attained the conviction that apple-trees should be grafted ought to know that it is wasteful to grow Red Oak, Beech, White Maple, and Alder, where White Oak, Hickory, Locust, and White Pine, might be grown with equal facility, in equal luxuriance, provided the right seeds were planted, and a little pains taken to keep down, for a year or two, the shoots spontaneously sent up by the wrong ones.
North of the Potomac, and east of the Ohio, and (I presume) in limited districts elsewhere, rocky, sterile woodlands, costing $2 to $50 per acre according to location, etc., are to-day the cheapest property to be bought in the United States. Even though nothing were done with them but keep out fire and cattle, and let the young trees grow as they will, money can be more profitably and safely invested in lands covered by young timber than in anything else. The parent, who would invest a few thousands for the benefit of children or grandchildren still young, may buy woodlands which will be worth twenty times their present cost within the next twenty years. But better even than this would it be to buy up rocky, craggy, naked hill-sides and eminences which have been pastured to death, and, shutting out cattle inflexibly, scratch these over with plow, mattock, hoe, or pick, as circumstances shall dictate, plant them thickly with Chestnut, Walnut, Hickory, White Oak, and the seeds of Locust and White Pine. I say Locust, though not yet certain that this tree must not be started in garden or nursery-beds and transplanted when two or three years old, so puny and feeble is it at the outset, and so likely to be smothered under leaves or killed out by its more favored neighbors. I have experiments in progress not yet matured, which may shed light on this point before I finish these essays.
Plant thickly, and of diverse kinds, so as to cover the ground promptly and choke out weeds and shrubs, with full purpose to thin and prune as circumstances shall dictate.
Many farmers are averse to planting timber, because (they think) nothing can be realized therefrom for the next twenty or thirty years, which is as long as they expect to live. But this is a grave miscalculation. Let us suppose a rocky, hilly pasture-lot of ten or twenty acres rudely scratched over as I have suggested, and thickly seeded with hickory nuts and white oak acorns only: within five years, it will yield abundantly of hoop poles, though the better, more promising half be left to mature, as they should be; two years later, another and larger crop of hoop-poles may be cut, still sparing the best; and thenceforth a valuable crop of timber may be taken from that land; for, if cut at the proper season, at least two thrifty sprouts will start from every stump; and so that wood will yield a clear income each year while its best trees are steadily growing and maturing. I do not advise restriction to those two species of timber; but I insist that a young plantation of forest-trees may and should yield a clear income in every year after its fourth.
As to the Far West—the Plains, the Parks, and the Great Basin—there is more money to be made by dotting them with groves of choice timber than by working the richest veins of the adjacent mountains. Whoever will promptly start, near a present or prospective railroad, forty acres of choice trees—Hickory, White Oak, Locust, Chestnut, and White Pine—within a circuit of three hundred miles from Denver, on land which he has made or is making provision to irrigate—may begin to sell trees therefrom two years hence, and persist in selling annually henceforth for a century—at first, for transplanting; very soon, for a variety of uses in addition to that.
—But this paper grows too long, and I must postpone to the next my more especial suggestions to young farmers with regard to tree-planting.