follow him in the furrow with my subsoiler. The first went down ten inches, and the latter ten more.

My neighbors were extremely kind with their suggestions. They had never seen such deep ploughing, and warned me not to turn up the old subsoil, and thus bring it to the surface. But they were not book-farmers.

Now, this business of deep subsoil ploughing is a matter of indispensable value in all agriculture, but especially so in the planting of an orchard. No tree can thrive as it ought to, unless the earth is thoroughly and deeply loosened for the free expansion of the roots. If I could have ploughed two feet deep, it would have been all the better. In fact, the art of ploughing is in its mere infancy in this country. Too many of us follow blindly in the beaten track. The first plough was a tough, forked stick, of which one prong served as a beam, while the other dug the earth as a coulter. Of course the ploughing was only scratching. It would have been preposterous to expect the ploughman of Hesiod’s or of Virgil’s time to turn up and mellow the soil to a depth of fifteen or sixteen inches. Down to the present age, ploughing was inevitably a shallow affair. But iron ploughs, steel ploughs, subsoil ploughs, have changed all this. It is as easy to-day to mellow the earth to the depth of two feet, as it was a century ago to turn over a sward to the depth of six inches. Besides, our fierce, trying climate, so different from the moist, milder one of England, Ireland, or even Holland, whence our ancestors emigrated, absolutely requires of us deep ploughing. Drought is our perpetual danger. Most crops are twenty to sixty per cent. short of what they would have been with adequate and seasonable moisture. That moisture exists not only in the skies above, but in the earth beneath our plants. Though the skies may capriciously withhold it, the earth never will, if we provide a rich, mellow subsoil through which the roots can descend for moisture.

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.

The tar was occasionally examined during the season, to see that it kept soft and sticky; and where any hardening was discovered, a fresh swabbing was applied. The whole operation was really one of very little trouble, while the result was highly remunerative. Thoughtfulness, industry, and a little tar, did the business effectually. I believe no nostrum of putting ashes round the butt of a peach-tree to kill the worms, or any other nostrum of the kind is worth a copper. The only sure remedy is prevention. Do not let the worms get in, and there will be no effort needed to get them out.

I planted none but the rarest and choicest kinds. Economy of a few cents in the price of a tree is no economy at all. It is the best fruit that sells the quickest and pays the highest profit. Yet there are still large quantities of fruit produced which is not worth taking to market. The best is cheaper for both buyer and seller. Hundreds of bushels of apples and peaches are annually made into execrable pies in all the large cities, merely because they can be purchased at less cost than those of a better quality. But it is a mistaken economy with the buyer, as a mild, good-flavored peach or apple requires less sugar, and will then make a better pie. Many persons have a pride in, and attach too much consequence to a tree which sprung up spontaneously on their own farm, or perhaps which they have cultivated with some care; and then numbers of comparatively worthless seedlings occupy the places that should be improved by finer varieties, and which, if cultivated, would afford a greater profit.

It is as easy to grow the choicest as the meanest fruit. I have a relative in Ohio who has a peach orchard of eleven acres, which has yielded him five thousand dollars in a single season, during which peaches were selling in Cincinnati at twenty-five cents a bushel. It is easy to understand that his orchard would not have produced him that sum at that price. No, it did not. He received two dollars a bushel more readily than his neighbors got twenty-five cents for the same variety of peaches, and this is how he did it. When the peaches had grown as large as a hickory nut, he employed a large force and put on one hundred and eighty-five days’ work in picking off the excess of fruit. More than one-half of the fruit then upon the trees was carefully removed. Each limb was taken by hand, and where, within a space of eighteen inches, there would be probably twenty peaches, but six or seven of the fairest would be left to ripen. Thus, by carefully removing all but the strongest specimens, and throwing all the vigor of the tree into them, the peaches ripen early, and are remarkable for size and excellence of quality.

But this was labor! Seven months’ labor of one man in a small peach orchard! But be it so—the net profit was between three and four thousand dollars. If he had neglected his trees, the owner’s profits would have been a crop of peaches hardly fit to feed the pigs. I have profited largely by following his example, and will relate my own experience when the returns of my orchard come in.

I intend to be particular touching my peach orchard, as well for the gratification of my own pride, as an incentive