XXV.
MORE ABOUT APPLE-TREES.
In my opinion, Apple-trees, in most orchards, are planted too far apart and allowed to grow taller and spread their limbs more widely than is profitable. I judge that a pruner or picker should be able to reach the topmost twig of any tree with a ten-foot pole, and that no limb should be allowed to extend more than eight feet from the trunk whence it springs. Our Autumnal Equinox occurs before our Apples are generally ripe for harvest, and, finding our best trees bending under a heavy burden of fruit, its fierce gales are apt to make bad work with trees as well as apples. The best tree I had, with several others, was thus ruined by an equinoctial tempest a few years since. Barren trees escape unharmed, while those heavily laden with large fruit are wrenched and twisted into fragments. And, even apart from this peril, a hundred weight of fruit at or near the extremity of limbs which extend ten or twelve feet horizontally from the trunk, tax and strain a tree more than four times that weight growing within four or five feet of the trunk, and on limbs that maintain a semi-erect position. I diffidently suggest, therefore, that no apple-tree be allowed to exceed fifteen feet in height, nor to send a limb more than eight feet from its trunk, and that trees be set (diamond-fashion) twenty-four feet apart each way, instead of thirty-two, as some of mine were. I judge that the larger number of trees (72 per acre) will produce more fruit in the average than the larger but fewer trees grown on squares of two by two rods to each, that they will thrive and bear longer, and that not one will be destroyed or seriously harmed by winds where a dozen would if allowed to grow as high and spread as far as they could.
Every apple-tree should be pruned each year of its life: that is, it should be carefully examined with intent to prune if that be found necessary. It should be pruned with a careful eye to giving it the proper shape, which, from the point where it first forks upward, should be that of a tea-cup, very nearly. I have seen young trees so malformed that they could rarely, if ever, bear fruit enough to render them profitable. And the pruning should be so carefully, judiciously done from the outset that no wood two years old should ever be cut away. With old, malformed, diseased, worm-eaten, decaying trees, the best must be done that can be; but he who, pruning a tree that he set and has hitherto cared for, finds himself obliged to cut off a limb thicker than his thumb, may justly suspect himself of lacking a mastery of the art of fruit-growing.
Sprouts from the root of an apple-tree remind me of children who habitually play truant or are kept out of school. They not merely can never come to good, but they are a nuisance to the neighborhood and bring reproach on the community.
The apple-grower should never forget that every producer needs to be fed in proportion to his product. If a cow gives twenty quarts of milk per day, she needs more grass or other food than if she gave but two quarts; and an acre of orchard that yields a hundred barrels of Apples per annum needs something given to the soil to balance the draft made upon it. Nature offers us good bargains; but she does not trust and will not be cheated. When she offers a bushel of Corn for a bushel of dirty Salt, Shell Lime, or Wood-Ashes, a load of Hay for a load of Muck, we ought not to stint the measure, but pay her demand ungrudgingly.