strawberries—the standard for the million. The Worden, a seedling of
the Concord, is very promising, and may yet prove to be a strong
competitor in the race. The Delaware does splendidly in the Fox River
Valley, but is not as reliable in all parts of the State as the
above-named varieties.
I have tried to recommend nothing but what will do well with good fair
cultivation upon any good soil. Yet you will often be annoyed in
selecting seed, from the fact that the same seed is sent out by
different seedsmen under different names. For instance, I have had early
peas sent to me under different names and by different seedsmen and all
planted on the same day, side by side, all cared for precisely alike,
and all alike claiming to be remarkably early and prolific as well as
excellent in quality, and yet every one of them precisely like the old
extra early Dan O’Rourke that I used to grow, I do not know how many
years ago.
The American Wonder is the only one of the new varieties that I have
tried in many years that really seems to be an acquisition to our list.
It is a dwarf about second early, and with me a good bearer, and of
excellent quality. I mention this to show the farmer that as a rule it
is better for him to rely upon the old standard list, until some grower
with whom he is acquainted has fairly tested the new variety, and
ascertained whether or not they are worthy of cultivation, and some good
common sense are all that is needed to insure a good farmers garden. In
twenty-five years I have failed but once to harvest at least a paying
crop of strawberries, and most of the time they have been both large and
profitable. During that time I have failed once to have a corn crop, and
have a number of times failed to have a paying crop of potatoes; in
fact, I have failed oftener with my potatoes than with any other of the
long list of crops that I attempt to grow. Yet if I should say to the
farmers of this audience that they did not know how to grow a crop of
potatoes, they would consider themselves insulted, though I presume that
not one of them has had complete success with them for any long series
of years.
Peas and onions should be put in as early as the land is in good
condition to work in the spring. If the ground freezes hard soon after
they are sprouted it will not injure them. Parsnips, beets, carrots,
radishes, turnips, cabbage, cauliflower, lettuce, and salsify will all
bear a little frost after they come up, but not much.
Corn, beans, peppers, tomatoes, vines of all kinds, require a warm soil
and will do their best in no other.
A place for the wife and children’s flowers should not be forgotten or
neglected. Give them a place, furnish help to prepare and care for it,
and do not complain about the little time and expense it takes, either.
Probably you will neither eat nor sell the flowers, but they will pay
you better than a few extra bushels of wheat would. We are apt to hear
complaints at our conventions that the young men will persist in leaving
their farm home and seeking a new one in some of the towns or cities.
Well, when I am traveling in our own and in other States and see so many
desolate, dreary places that are called farmhouses—no trees, no
shrubbery, no fruit, no flowers, no garden, in fact, nothing but a shell
of a house, and some land, and it is fair to suppose that it is about as
cheerless inside the house as it is dreary outside of it, I often wonder
how, or why, any bright, active, wide-awake young man can stay there one
day after he is at liberty to leave.
Gentlemen, I know that there are many beautiful exceptions to the above
described homes, and that they are yearly becoming more numerous. If the
exceptions could become the universal rule, what a glorious Northwest we
should have! Presidents of State agricultural societies would not have
to warn their friends against attempting to get through the tangled mass
of weeds called the garden. The man who has been to college would no
longer fret because his vines could not grow. The President of the State
Dairymen’s Association would no longer buy cabbage plants or cabbage.
Neither would he be compelled to order out his team and mow his garden
before his conscience would allow him to teach others how to farm.
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.
But nothing more than a general outline of the course to be pursued can
be indicated here; and nothing more is necessary for the intelligent
amateur, fruit-grower, or orchardist, who feels the strength of the
proof, and accepts the situation.
In these latter days most of the diseases which afflict humanity are
believed to be attributable to improper nutrition and faulty hygiene,
and are relieved or cured by a more or less radical change in food and
habitat.
In the animal world, the truth appears in a still stronger light;
while in the vegetable kingdom, nutrition counts for almost everything.
Still, in the case of the peach yellows and pear blight, both appear, on
first sight, to be distinct diseases, neither yielding to any remedy yet
applied to them, and both being attended with the present fashionable
bacteria, which are made responsible for many diseases and all
epidemics. But has anybody yet made the experiment whether water
supplied copiously to the spare and thin roots of the pear will or will
not prevent the blight, or tried the same thing with the peach? We all
know the gigantic and venerable pear trees of the Wabash and Kaskaskia
country were planted on the sandy second bottoms of the rivers named,
where in their early youth, if not in their mature age, water was always
within easy reach of their roots; and we have seen the item in the
agricultural papers telling how one experimenter at least, has saved his
pear trees from blight by copious watering. The prairie and timber
country both are drying out and losing soil moisture very much faster
than we have any conception of. Situations where moisture in the soil
was abundant enough for all crop purposes twenty-five years ago,
suffered quickly after a brief drought now, and would be benefited by
irrigation where it would have been injurious fifty years before.
Beside, we have borrowed many of our ideas from the fruit-growing
experiences of the East, and they from the cooler and moister countries
of Europe. And in that way the amount of right teaching has been too
attenuated, until it is in many respects practically worthless.
B. F. J.
THE MODEL ILLINOIS NURSERY.
We have visited in our time very many nurseries both East and West. We
have seen those East where the elaboration of landscape gardening was
made to add effect to and set off the nursery stock grown. We have seen
West hundreds of acres covered with stock in a single nursery. Yet we
have never seen the perfection of details coupled with strict accuracy
as to name in the varieties of stock grown, united to evenness and vigor
in growth, nor a stricter method displayed in adaptation of varieties
suited to the climate of the West, added to the most perfect cultivation
and handling of stock, than at the premium nurseries of Spaulding & Co.,
near Springfield, Ill.
These nurseries, covering 375 acres originally, of first-class land,
were thoroughly tile-drained, at heavy expense before anything was
planted thereon, the land having been first cleaned and stumped of its
timber. Thus, the groundwork having been laid for a great and model
nursery, under the management of Mr. J. B. Spaulding, a well-known
nurseryman of many years’ standing in Illinois, and whose practical
experience from a critical standpoint is perhaps broader than that of
any man in the West, it is not strange that whenever entered for premium
before the State Board of Agriculture, such should have been unanimously
awarded by the committee of examination. This, however, the records of
the board will show.
In speaking of the artistic adornment of some old and extensive
nurseries East, we find this difference: In the nurseries of Mr. J. B.
Spaulding the useful is never lost sight of. Mere ornament is not what
strikes the visitor, and yet the nursery is one beautiful picture in its
varied and blending colors of fruit, flowers, and foliage; for the
orchard and garden are by no means neglected—the visitor can find the
fruits themselves, the crucial test. It is worth the journey to see.
The immense stock, the ample building, the splendid drives, the office
connected with the Western Union Telegraph lines by telephone, and
everything pertaining to the great nursery, is kept in the most perfect
condition. Blight and borers are strangers to their 10,000 orchard trees
of pear, peach, chestnut, and apples, all of varieties unexcelled, and
adapted to the soil and climate of the West. The real gist of the whole,
however, lies in the record of sales of this nursery for the fall
delivery just closed, which amounts to nearly $120,000.
The most gratifying success has attended the efforts of this firm in
growing stock. Of 150,000 buds set the past season, comprising cherries,
pears, plums, and peaches, almost no rebudding has been required, and
their stand is unexampled. It is not strange that the firm have the
approval of the State Board of Agriculture and nurserymen of experience
East and West, especially from the large nurseries proprietors of
Western New York. All unite in saying Spaulding & Co.’s grounds,
comprising upward of 375 acres, thoroughly tile-drained, for the growing
of nursery stock, are unsurpassed. The 1,500,000 one, two, and
three-year old apple trees, and 175,000 one, two, and three-year old
cherry trees—the latter budded on Mahaleb roots, imported from
France—together with their enormous stock of evergreens, pears, roses,
shrubs, etc., are matchless in their perfection of growth, whether it be
from an Eastern or Western standpoint.
In driving through the nursery we were shown a large block of American
chestnuts, from five to eight feet high, and thence were driven to the
chestnut orchard nearly all in bearing. The chestnut here seems fully as
much at home as any other plant cultivated.
For the protection of their patrons against outside imposition, each of
their nearly one hundred selected salesmen are accredited with a
certificate of agency.
The long experience of this firm, being nearly thirty years in the
business at Springfield, Ill.; the reputation they enjoy; the approval
and indorsement they receive from the State—all commend this nursery to
the favorable attention of those who have ground upon which to plant
shrubbery or trees.
THE BASKET WILLOW.
A correspondent wishes some information about the basket willow. In
Onondaga county, Central New York, this willow is cultivated and
manufactured on a large scale and is, in fact, a leading industry. The
cultivation is increasing very rapidly and is a great benefit to this
and neighboring counties. The baskets made from this willow are better
and cheaper than the splint basket, and raising the stock is found to
pay much better than other farm crops, while the manufacture gives
employment to hundreds of men, women, and children, who would otherwise
have nothing to do during the winter.
These willows are grown on high land and on low land, on wet and dry
land, and on very cheap land, and on land that is worth one thousand
dollars per acre. The crop needs to be planted but once, and an average
yearly crop can not be worth less than one hundred dollars per acre. As
the timber suitable for baskets is getting scarce and dear, it is plain
that the demand for willow will increase every year. In most parts of
the country are Germans who understand working the willow, and it is a
great benefit to them and to their neighbors to have this industry
introduced. Not one farmer in a dozen has on his place as many baskets
as he needs, for the reason that they are scarce and dear. This willow
is the easiest thing in the world to raise, and yet we import from
Europe $5,000,000 worth a year.
About two hundred tons of willow are manufactured every year in one
little village in this State. One man in Syracuse told me he should send
to New York this winter one hundred and forty tons of peeled willow,
mostly of his own growing. In all the large cities more or less willow
is manufactured every year, and the amount thus worked in the city of
Milwaukee is very large. This industry is a benefit to the whole
community and deserves to be encouraged, and the West especially should
take a deep interest in extending it. The fact that it gives employment
to poor during the winter, thus making comfort take the place of want,
should exert a great influence in its favor. Here then is a means by
which the farmer can put money in his pocket and help his poor neighbor
at the same time. I have no interest in this matter as I do not raise,
buy, or sell, but I do know it has been a great blessing to our State.
There is one variety grown here that is much preferred to any other, but
I can not find out the true name for it. Even the man that brought it
here does not know its name.
In a future number I will give directions for planting, etc.
A. M. WILLIAMS
LONG ISLAND, N. Y.
* * * * *
SEEDS, Etc.
[Illustration]
VICK’S FLORAL GUIDE
For 1884 is an Elegant Book of 150 Pages, 3 Colored Plates of FLOWERS
and VEGETABLES, and more than 1000 Illustrations of the choicest
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VICK’S SEEDS ARE THE BEST IN THE WORLD. The FLORAL GUIDE will tell how
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VICK’S ILLUSTRATED MONTHLY MAGAZINE, 32 Pages, a Colored Plate in every
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Specimen numbers sent for 10 cents; 3 trial copies 25 cts.
Address.
JAMES VICK,
Rochester, N. Y.
* * * * *
[Illustration: FERRY’S SEED ANNUAL FOR 1884]
Will be mailed FREE TO ALL applicants and to customers of last year
without ordering it. It contains illustrations, prices, descriptions and
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INVALUABLE TO ALL.
D. M. FERRY & CO.
DETROIT, Mich.
* * * * *
J. B. ROOT & CO.’S
[Illustration]
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Market Gardeners SEEDS a Specialty.
Write for Wholesale Price-List.
—> SENT FREE
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[Illustration: KIEFFER]
99,999 PEACH TREES All _best varieties_ of new and old Strawberries,
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EARLY CLUSTER
New Blackberry, early, hardy, good. Single hill yielded 13 quarts at
one picking. Send for FREE Catalogue.
J.S. COLLINS, Moorestown, N.J.
* * * * *
BLUE STEM SPRING WHEAT!!!
The best variety of Prairie Wheat known. Yields
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Also celebrated Judson Oats for sale in small lots.
Samples, statement of yield, and prices sent free upon
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SAMPSON & FRENCH,
Woodstock, Pipestone Co., Minn., or Storm Lake, Ia.
When you write mention THE PRAIRIE FARMER.
* * * * *
BLOOMINGTON NURSERY CO.
BLOOMINGTON, ILL.
Established 1852, by F. K. PHŒNIX Incorporated 1883. We offer for the
_Spring Trade_ a very large & fine stock of every description of Fruit &
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SEEDS
Our large GARDEN GUIDE describing _Cole’s Reliable Seeds_ is MAILED FREE
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SEED-POTATOES and SEEDS.
[Illustration]
60 newest varieties of potatoes. Garden seeds. Seed Grain, etc., at
lowest prices. Illustrated catalogue and treatise on POTATO CULTURE,
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* * * * *
SEEDS! PLANTS—Catalogue Free.
A. E. SPALDING,
AINSWORTH, IOWA.
* * * * *
[Illustration: SEEDS FOR THE GARDEN, FARM & FIELD.]
ESTABLISHED 1845.
Our Annual Catalogue, mailed free on application, published first of
every January, contains full description and prices of RELIABLE
VEGETABLE, TREE, FIELD AND FLOWER SEED, SEED GRAIN, SEED CORN, SEED
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Address PLANT SEED COMPANY,
Nos. 812 & 814 N. 4th St., ST. LOUIS, MO.
* * * * *
SIBLEY’S TESTED SEEDS,
For all Climates, For all Soils, All Plants.
EVERY SACK TESTED FOR VITALITY. ALL TESTED IN GARDENS FOR PURITY AND
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CATALOGUE AND PRICE LIST OF ALL TESTED VARIETIES, FREE.
Mail orders promptly filled, making a Seed Store at home. Send for
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HIRAM SIBLEY & CO., Rochester, N.Y. and Chicago, Ill.
* * * * *
SEEDS
ALBERT DICKINSON,
Dealer in Timothy, Clover, Flax, Hungarian, Millet, Red Top, Blue
Grass, Lawn Grass, Orchard Grass, Bird Seeds, &c.
POP CORN.
Warehouses {115, 117 & 119 Kinzie St.
{104, 106, 108 & 110 Michigan St.
OFFICE. 115 Kinzie St.
CHICAGO, ILL.
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_THE PRAIRIE FARMER is printed and published by The Prairie Farmer
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