When the dairy shall be more thought of—when wintering stock, and fattening it, shall be more carefully studied—we predict that our farmers will annually raise thousands of bushels of roots, and have capacious cellars under their barns to store them in.
We must give up thinking of _remedies_ for blights and diseases of fruit-trees and seek after _preventives_. Amputation may limit its ravages; but surgery is not a remedy, but a resource after remedies fail. We must, it seems to us, look for a preventive in a wiser system of fruit cultivation. To this subject we shall now speak.
The effect of cultivation in changing the habits of plants is familiar to all. Incident to this artificial condition of the plant, there will be new diseases, vegetable vices, which, as they result from cultivation, must be regarded in every perfect system of cultivation.
Where trees are grown for timber, or shade, or ornament, everything can be sacrificed to the production of wood and foliage. But in fruit-trees wood is nothing and fruit is everything. We push for _quantity_ and _quality_ of fruit; and would not regard the wood or foliage at all, if it were not indispensable as a means of procuring fruit. That is the most skillful treatment of fruit-trees which involves a just compromise between the wants of the _tree_, and the abundance and excellence of _fruit_. There is a way of gaining fruit by a rapid consumption of the tree; and there is a method of gaining fruit by invigorating and prolonging the tree. Two systems of cultivation grow out of these different methods—a natural system and an artificial system. All _cultivation_ is artificial, even the rudest. By natural system, then, is only meant a treatment which interferes but _little_ with nature; and by artificial, a system in which skill is applied to every part of the vegetable economy. For conservatories, gardens, and experimental grounds, there is no reason why an artificial system should not exist. Moral considerations restrain us from stimulating a man or a beast to procure a quick or a large return at the expense of life and limb; but in vegetable matters our _preference_ or interest is the only restraint. If any reason exists for forcing a tree to bear young, and enormously, and after ten years’ service for throwing it away, it is proper to do it. For larger show-fruit we _ring_ a limb expecting to sacrifice the branch; we diminish the life of the pear by putting it to a dwarf habit by violent means. If we have any sufficiently desirable object to accomplish, there is no reason why we should not do it. There may be as good reasons for limiting a tree to ten years as a strawberry bed to three.