Establishing Your Orchard - Notes on Ploughing, Planning, and Planting - An Article with Study Questions

ESTABLISHING THE ORCHARD

WITH the nursery stock ordered and the orchard site chosen, we are free to consider the question of preparing the land and setting the trees. The preparation ought to be as thorough as the circumstances will permit. In actual practice, among good growers, it will vary all the way from the man who wants to know at least a year in advance where he is going to set his trees in order that he may grow a crop on the land that will leave the soil in the best possible condition for the young orchard, to the man who plows up old pasture for his orchard, or the man who does not even insist that the land shall he fully cleared of stumps. The results will vary just as widely though not in exactly the same way. That is, the man who uses stump land may develop a fine lot of trees, provided the soil is naturally good and provided also that he takes good care of the trees. The objection to the method is the difficulty he experiences in taking good care of them, and the danger that this difficulty will discourage him. The writer very much prefers to have the land under cultivation the year before the orchard is set out, and if the crop grown on the land can be one which leaves the soil in specially good condition, such a crop as beans, or buckwheat, or even corn or potatoes, so much the better.

One Year’s Preparation.—In one orchard which the writer had a hand in setting, there was a block of sixteen acres which was mostly old pasture but in one corner of which a field of about four acres had been fenced off the year previous and planted to corn. When the orchard was