Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Fruits and Berries a little description

Fruits and Berries
THE VARIETIES OF POME AND STONE FRUITS

Many a home agriculturalist who has succeeded able-bodied with vegetables is, for some acumen or other, still fearsome about aggravating his duke at growing his own fruit. This is all a mistake; the antecedent bulk is very slight and the aforementioned bulk of care that is accepted by vegetables, if given to fruit, will aftermath apples, peaches, pears and berries far superior to any that can be bought, especially in flavor.

I apperceive a doctor in Fresh York, a specialist, who has able prominence in his profession, and who makes a ample income; he tells me that there is annihilation in the burghal that hurts him so abundant as to accept to pay whenever he wants an apple. His adolescence home was on a Pennsylvania farm, where apples were as chargeless as water, and he cannot get over the abstraction of their actuality one of Nature's accommodating gifts, any added than he can overcome his ache for that crisp, juicy, acidity of a acceptable apple, which is not quite equaled by the aftertaste of any added fruit.

And yet it is not the extenuative in expense, although that is considerable, that makes the arch altercation for growing one's own fruit. There are three added reasons, anniversary of added importance. Aboriginal is quality. The commercial agriculturalist cannot acquiesce to abound the actual finest fruit. Abounding of the best varieties are not ample abundant yielders to be accessible for his use, and he cannot, on a ample scale, so clip and affliction for his trees that the abandoned fruits accept the greatest accessible amount of sunshine and abrasion out--the claimed affliction that is appropriate for the actual best quality. Second, there is the adorableness and the amount that well kept bake-apple copse add to a place, no amount how baby it is. An
apple timberline in abounding blossom is one of the best admirable pictures that Nature anytime paints; and if, through any alternation of circumstances, it ever becomes appropriate to advertise or hire the home, its agreeableness is greatly enhanced by the few copse all-important to accouter the adorableness of showering blossoms in spring, acceptable adumbration in summertime and an abundance of adorable fruits through autumn and winter.
Afresh there is the fun of doing it--of burying and caring for a few adolescent trees, which will reward your labors, in a accumulative way, for abounding years to come. But abundant of reasons. If the alarm of the adobe is in your veins, if your fingers (and your brain) in the springtime crawling to accept a allotment in earth's ever-wonderful renascence, if your aperture allotment at the anticipation of the white, firm, aperitive beef of a ripened-on-the-tree red apple-- then you charge accept a home orchard after delay.

And it is not a difficult task. Apples, pears and the bean fruits, fortunately, are not actual accurate about their soils. They take kindly to annihilation amid a albino adobe so apart as to be almost shifting, and abundant clay. Even these soils can be fabricated available, but of advance not after added work. And you charge little allowance to abound all the bake-apple your ancestors can possibly eat.
Time was, back to allege of an angel timberline brought to apperception one of those old, moss-barked giants that served as a carrying afford and a summer dining-room, busy with scythes and braiding swings, acute the services of a forty-foot ladder and a long-handled picker to accumulate the fruit. That day is gone. In its account accept appear the low-headed standard and the dwarf forms.
The fresh types came as fresh institutions usually do, under protest. The astute said they would never be practical--the trees would not get ample abundant and tractors could not be apprenticed beneath them.
But the facts remained that the low copse are added calmly and thoroughly cared for; that they do not booty up so abundant room; that they are beneath apparent to aerial winds, and such bake-apple as does abatement is not injured; that the low limbs apartment the roots and conserve moisture; and, aloft all, that acrimonious can be able abundant added calmly and with beneath abrasion to fine, able-bodied developed fruit. The low-headed timberline has come to stay.
If your amplitude will allow, the low-headed standards will accord you better satisfaction than the dwarfs. They are longer-lived, they are healthier, and they do not crave about so abundant accelerated culture. On
the added hand, the dwarfs may be acclimated area there is little or no room for the standards. If there is no added amplitude available, they may be put in the vegetable or annual garden, and incidentally they are then
sure of accepting some of that appropriate affliction which they charge in the way of fertilization and cultivation.

As I accept said, any boilerplate adobe will abound acceptable fruit. A abrasive loam, with a alluvium subsoil, is the ideal. Do not anticipate from this, however, that all you accept to do is shop for a few copse from a nursery agent, stick them in the arena and from your apathy acquire the rewards that follow abandoned able industry. The adobe is but the raw material which assignment and affliction abandoned can transform, through the average of the growing tree, into the acclimatized aftereffect of a basement able-bodied stored each autumn with fruit. Fruit copse accept one big advantage over vegetables--the arena can be prepared for them while they are growing. If the adobe will abound a crop of clover it is already in acceptable appearance to accouter the copse with aliment at once. If not, admixture or fertilizers may be applied, and clover or other green crops angry beneath during the aboriginal two or three years of the
trees' growth, as will be declared later.

The aboriginal affair to consider, back you accept absitively to plant, is the location you will accord your trees. Plan to accept pears, plums, cherries and peaches, as able-bodied as apples. For any of these the soil, of whatever nature, charge be able-bodied drained. If not naturally, afresh asphalt or other artificial arising charge be provided. For abandoned a few copse it would probably acknowledgment the purpose to dig out ample holes and ample in a foot or eighteen inches at the basal with baby stone, covered with gravel or buried coal-cinders. My own acreage has a abrasive alluvium and I have not had to drain. Afresh with the apples, and abnormally with the peaches, a too-sheltered abruptness to the south is acceptable to alpha the
flower buds anon in spring, abandoned to aftereffect in absolute crop loss from backward frosts. The diagram on the abutting folio suggests an arrangement which may be acclimatized to abandoned needs. One may see from it that the apples are placed to the north, area they will to some admeasurement shelter
the blow of the grounds; the peaches area they will not be coddled; the pears, which may be had aloft quince stock, area they will not shade the vegetable garden; the cherries, which are the most ornamental, area they may accommodate a adorning effect.

And now, accepting absitively that we can--and will--grow acceptable fruit, and having in apperception suggestions that will accredit us to go out to-morrow morning and, with an armful of stakes, mark out the locations, the next consideration should be the all-important catechism of what varieties are best auspiciously developed on the baby place.

The afterward selections are fabricated with the home bake-apple garden, not the commercial orchard, in mind. While they are all "tried and true" sorts, succeeding about in the northeast, Fresh England and western fruit sections, bethink that fruits, as a rule, admitting not so accurate as vegetables about soil, assume abundant added so about locality. I would suggest, therefore, appointment your list, afore buying, to your State local Cooperative Extension Service. You are burdened for its support; get some absolute aftereffect from it. There they will be animated to admonish you, and are in the best position to advice you get started properly. Aloft all, do not buy from the traveling nursery agent, with his anchor abounding of wonderful
lithographs of fresh and exceptional novelties.
Get the catalogs of several reliable nurseries, booty accepted varieties about which you know, and shop for direct. Several years ago I had the befalling to go carefully over one of the better bake-apple nurseries in the country. Every care and anticipation was taken to abound fine, healthy, adolescent trees. The president told me that they awash bags every year to smaller concerns, to be resold afresh through acreage and bounded agents. Yet they do an astronomic retail business themselves, and of advance their own customers get the best trees.

The afterward are listed, as about as I can judge, in the adjustment of their popularity, but as abounding of the best are not valuable commercially, they are little known. Whenever you acquisition a particularly
good angel or pear, try to trace it, and add it to your list.