rface, where capillary force is rapidly carrying back
to the surface what has already soaked in, we invite ultimate failure
when the drought comes. Cultivate once a week, or after each rain, when
they come oftener than that, with something that will keep two or three
inches of very fine, mellow earth on the surface, and will cause an
amount of water to be retained in the soil below the earth mulch that
will surprise any one who has never tried it. An ordinary harrow will do
very well, or better a five-tooth cultivator, behind which I fasten a
2x4 scantling with large wire nails driven through it, about two inches
apart, weighted on the back edge to keep it right side up; the scantling
is cut as long as the width of the cultivator. At one operation the
cultivator and this harrow leave the ground about like a hand-rake
would, marked only by the footprints of the driver. Last summer this was
used several times where young peach trees had been set out, going
around each row and sometimes over the entire ground. There was no time
during the summer that the trees stopped growing or showed signs of
needing more moisture than they had. Nine hundred and ninety-four lived,
the horses killed two, and the borers two more. Fifteen years ago I
bought a small farm having on it a small family orchard of seventy-two
apple trees. It included several varieties, from summer to winter sorts.

The trees were 28x28 feet apart, with peach trees alternating both ways,
making three times as many peaches as apples in the orchard. The land
was cultivated until the trees were ten years old, then sowed to timothy
and clover. The timothy soon died out; but the clover lived for a few
years, but is gone now. It happened that some of the years that it was
not cultivated were some of the driest during the fifteen, and several
trees died of blight. Would this have happened if the cultivation had
been continued? I have gone to plowing and cultivating again, anyway,
with no crop in the orchard. The trees are now fifteen or twenty feet
high, and about twelve inches in diameter at the ground. The peach trees
have mostly been cut out. Cannot see that they did any harm, unless it
might have been harder on the apple trees during the dry season; but if
it was, the peaches were worth about as much as the apples, and the
trees make a quick, bushy growth, thus forming a shelter for the apple
trees, which now stand straight and are well balanced. We have had a
peach c