Instead of these, should be homes beautiful, homes bright, homes happy—so happy that the young would be loath to leave and glad to return. As our Northwest is the grandest portion of our republic, so should our homes be the most beautiful, and the inmates thereof the most intelligent as well as the happiest and most contented citizens of our wide domain.
[Our Future Orchards.]
Granting our Apple Orchards on High lands, Ridges, and Slopes are Suffering, or Starving from Insufficient Moisture, What will be our best course with them?
Number Four.
In the first place, it may be well to enlarge a little on the subject of deficient moisture the average orchard is liable to on prairie and all other Western soils of a drift origin, where the strata lie nearly parallel to the plane of the earth’s surface. Here there are, therefore, few, if any, of those springs or fountains of water which often supply abundant moisture to land of considerable slope and elevation. If this difference in geological conditions is taken into account, it will explain why, in many sections, orchards often do quite remarkably well on hillsides and mountain slopes.
There is little or no resemblance between the apple tree and the orange tree, when both are botanically considered; but considered from the point of view as a source of fruit, the one is the best product of warm climates, and the other of cold ones; both being esteemed nearly universally. The orange being a very juicy, and at the same time, a fruit in which sweet and sour are equally blended, requires a moist soil and a large supply of water, in addition to a relatively high temperature. Accordingly, when grown in warm but dry climates, as in Spain and along the north shore of the Mediterranean, the ground bearing orange trees is uniformly copiously irrigated two or three times a month, during the warm season, and every two months in the winter. The orange-producing portion of Louisiana is mostly confined to the sixty or seventy square miles of cultivatable land along the Mississippi river banks, south of New Orleans. Here the soil is alluvial and sandy, the rainfall sixty or seventy inches per annum, and the state of the atmosphere so continuously humid, as to drape all arboreal vegetation with moss. Florida has the same rainfall, the same humid atmosphere, the same moss, with the advantage of a soil quite as sandy, in which, as constitutes elements, phosphoric acid and potash abound in far greater proportions than in the alluvial of the Mississippi. And it is probably due to this happy association of heat, humidity, a sandy soil, rich in the phosphates of lime and salts of potash, that Florida oranges really are, and are regarded the best in the world. But in spite of these advantages, and another, no less important—that by capillary attraction, through the sand—the orange roots have direct and easy access to water beneath; it is found that the trees do better if mulched to prevent evaporation during the cool months—they being the dry season, while the summer months are the wet. The Louisiana orange-growers go farther; they not only mulch liberally with rice straw every year, but in addition, every third or fourth year, from eight inches to a foot of the earth under the trees is removed and new earth put in its place.
From these statements we get some idea of the amount of water the orange tree demands in the soil, and the measure of moisture in the atmosphere, to supply evaporation from its large evergreen leaf surface and fill its fruit with juice. An apple tree is not an orange tree, to be sure, but when in leaf, and bearing a heavy crop of fruit, the farmer must necessarily make large drafts on the soil to meet the surface evaporation and supply the required juice to its fruit. Every tree in leaf is a pump, constantly drawing on the soil and drying it, and in all reasonable probability the drafts are in proportion to fruit and foliage. Has any body calculated the daily demand for moisture a twenty-five-year old Northern Spy, or Baldwin, carrying twenty or thirty bushels of apples makes on the soil beneath and around it during the hot and dry months of August and September? The quantity probably is largely in excess of the common estimate, and perhaps not half required by the orange—but it is so much it affords a sufficient reason why such trees grow faster, are healthier, and bear more and better fruit, on lands that are moist, than on lands that are dry.
But orchards on high lands, or on slopes, or on slopes and ridges, suffering for moisture, can not be removed to low lands, nor can they be irrigated, except at an enormous expense. What then can be done? In the first place, the annual rainfall can be held to the space it falls upon, under the tree, by the throwing up a furrow or ridge around it, as far out as the limbs extend, where the ground is level, and by a dam on the lower side, when the ground slopes. The latter could also be made to stay a portion of the rain falling on the higher ground above. Further: a general system of mulching ought to be adopted; not for the purpose alone of keeping the surface moist, but also for supplying food to the roots as the mulch decays. If the orchard is in grass, clover, or weeds, they should be mowed at least twice a year, the burden suffered to lie on the ground and rot, or be thrown under the trees. After pruning, the wood removed should either be left where it falls, or piled in heaps about the orchard and suffered to rot as in the “hammock” land orange groves of Florida, where the under brush and extra timber is rarely burned, but piled in heaps to rot away.
If it is desirable to bring barren trees into bearing, or to rescue them from decay and death those in an unhealthy state, measures of a more radical and expensive character must be taken, measures similar to those which have been practiced for centuries with the grape vine, with complete success. These measures consist either in removing the earth under the trees and putting new and fresh earth in its place, as practiced with orange trees in Louisiana, and on the coffee plantations in the tropics, or in digging a deep and wide ditch around the tree, inside the outer diameter of the branches, and refilling it with near half the earth removed and half such mineral fertilizers and amendments as tree leaves and refuse decaying vegetable matter of any sort for the other half.