The hotter and dryer the weather, the better our plants will grow, if they have rich, warm earth beneath them, reaching down to and including moisture. We cannot, and we need not plough so very deep each year to assure this, if the subsoil is so underdrained that the superabundant moisture of the wet season does not pack it. Underdraining as the foundation, and deep ploughing as the superstructure, with ample manuring and generous tillage, will secure us ample crops, such as any section of our country has rarely seen. Our corn should average seventy bushels per acre. Every field should be ready to grow wheat, if required. Every grass-lot should be good for three tons of hay per acre. Abundant fruits should gladden our fields and enrich our farmers’ tables. So should our children no longer seek, in flight to crowded cities or the remote West, an escape from the ill-paid drudgery and intellectual barrenness of their fathers’ lives, but find abundance and happiness in and around their childhood’s happy homes.
I laid out two hundred dollars in the purchase of old, well-rotted stable manure from the city, spread it over the ten acres, and ploughed up nine of them. I then set out my peach-trees on six acres, planting them in rows eighteen feet apart, and eighteen feet asunder in the rows. This accommodated a hundred and thirty-four to the acre, or eight hundred and four in all. These would not be in the way of any other crop, and in three years would be likely to yield a good return. The roots of every tree underwent a searching scrutiny before it was planted, to see that they harbored no members of that worm family which is so surely destructive of the peach. As trees are often delivered from the nursery with worms in them, so many of these were infected. The enemy was killed, and the butt of each tree was then swabbed with common tar, extending from where the roots begin to branch out, about twelve inches up. It is just about there, say between wind and water, at the surface of the ground, where the bark is soft, that in June and September the peach-moth deposits her eggs. From these is hatched the worm which kills the tree, unless picked out and destroyed.
To perform this searching operation on a thousand trees every year, would be laborious and expensive. There would also be great danger of its being imperfectly done, as many worms might escape the search, while the vital power of the tree would be seriously impaired by permitting them to prey upon its bark and juices even for a few months. Prevention would be far cheaper than curing. The offensive odor of the tar will cause the moth to shun the tree and to make her deposits somewhere else; while if any chance to light upon it, they will stick to the tar and there perish, like flies upon a sheet of fly paper.