Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 May 1874 — Experience with Peaches. [ARTICLE]

Experience with Peaches.

After nine years engaged in growing peaches, I find the old method of training the trees so low to be wrong. I find that peach trees, trained three and a half feet to four and a half feet are as healthy and not so liable to break when in fruit as low-trained trees. The fruit can be gathered as early, as the branches are not so upright, but more spreading. The peach tree needs clean culture the first three years after planting, and it is very difficult to cultivate the trees when the branches are so low. I have practiced banking the ground up around the trees in the spring; I find it a great help to keep the borer out Ashes and muck composted make a good fertilizer for the peach, on lighfithin soils. Potash dissolved in.water, so it will bear a potato, is a good wash, but care is needed in not using it too strong; it can be safely applied to four-year-old trees or Older, as far up on the branches as can be reached from standing on the ground. Old trees, ten to fifteen years, can be renewed by cutting off all the top when frozen, leaving the main branches four to six feet long, and leaving sll' the sprouts, on that are beneath where the large branches are cut off. The colder the weather when the top is cut the more vigorous will be the new growth in the spring. The peaches fer which I was awarded the first premium at the American Pomological Society meeting, held in Boston in September last, were mostly grown on trees treated as above, fourteen to sixteen years of age. The trees are now in as vigorous and healthy condition as young trees, and the

fruit grown on them is superior to that grown on young trees. — Delaware Cor. New York Tribune. Timothy Wheeler, of Waterbury Cen ter, Vt., has some remarkable ideas about food and drink. He has confined himself to a vegetable diet for ten years, and, five years ago, he got it into his heaid that people in general drink too much; accordingly, he went thirty-eight days the first year without taking any liquids into his system, the second year seventy days, the third year one hundred and thirty, the fourth one hundred and seventy, and, up to the 16th of April, he had gone two hundred and twenty-eight days in the fifth year without drinking anything whatever.