t
is very bad. It destroys the air drainage--

Mr. Kellogg: That is why they are liable to blight.

Mr. Maher: And they blight also. The air drainage is interfered with,
and you get blight, and you also smother the orchard. I don't know but
what the apple and the Americana plum are about as hardy trees as we
have anywhere. I don't make any attempt to protect them specially except
from the south and west. I don't put any northern windbreak around any
orchards I set out. Of course, we may lose a crop with a spring frost
all right when northern protection might save it, but with us up in our
country if we have a good spring frost it is usually heavy enough to
catch them anyway.

[Illustration: Norway Poplar windbreak at Devil's Lake, N.D.]

I have a question here: How long should a shelter-belt be cultivated?
Now, that is a point on which I think too much emphasis is placed. If
you set out your trees as Judge Moyer did his, close together, inside of
a few years they will take care of themselves, they will form forest
conditions very quickly, and cultivation is not necessary any more. Of
course, if you set your trees a great distance apart where there is
nothing to protect them from the burning sun, and the ground bakes and
dries, then you must cultivate or mulch, but I think cultivation much
better than mulching.

Another question: How many rows of trees make a good windbreak? My idea
is that it takes twenty rows to make a good one--of deciduous trees, of
course. Two or three rows of evergreens, planted not further than eight
feet apart and with joints broken, probably makes as good a windbreak as
the twenty rows of deciduous trees and take less ground.

Mr. Horton: Wouldn't you have an open space in those trees? You wouldn't
put them all together?

Mr. Maher: If I had twenty rows of trees I would put them together.

Mr. Horton: Would you have an open space outside of those twenty trees
for the snow to lodge in?

[Illustration: Ponderosa Pine windbreak--at Devil's Lake (N.D.)
Nursery.]

Mr. Maher: I have never known the snow to do any hurt in a twenty row
windbreak. It distributes itself in there, and the more comes the
better.

Mr. Horton: I have seen them broken badly with the snow.

Mr. Maher: That would be probably the poplars and trees that break
easily.

Mr. Horton: On my farm I put out a row of twenty trees. Outside of that
I left a space on the north and west six rods wide, and I put out some
gold