FRUIT TREES IN JANUARY

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 857, 28 December 1929, Page 26

FRUIT TREES IN JANUARY

January is usually a dry month. It is a good thing that the rain keeps away. There is a lot of fruit to ripen and harvest. Wet weather very quickly spoils the peaches, plums, nectarines. All the soft-skinned fruit is too tender to stand warmth and water at about the same time. Everyone who has a small home orchard will have harvested something worth while. Early plums and early peaches were good this season.

If you are intending to plant any fruit trees early in the winter, keep your eye open for a few varieties that please you. There are still a lot of plums and peaches and apples to ripen before all the summer crop has been harvested. Always try and secure some- of the best of the earliest lines to ripen. When the main crop fruits are in the market, the prices are fairly low. It is the early peach that makes an impression on your palate and on your pocket as well.

By now the fruit trees have made most of the growth they will put up this year. Ripening that wood and developing fruit buds is the work of the moment.

Unless you know something about the trees, leave them alone. A greenhorn does more harm than good. Ask any neighbour who has had experience to show you anything that you are desirous of knowing. Anyone can spoil a year’s work with an hour’s fooling.

Keep the soil surface under the citrus trees well mulched with leaf mould, old manure, grass clippings, or even well rotted manure. Trees like good food. We do not give them half enough attention.

When the peaches or apples are well formed, you can give the trees a heavy watering. Don’t be niggardly Give something and you stand a chance of gathering something. Those

who are content to take everything very often miss a lot of profit and pleasure as well.

See that the new loganberry canes are well tied up to prevent them being broken. It is in the shoots produced this season that the next flowers and fruits will appear. Cut out all the dry canes. Spent wood is only a hinderance to the loganberry vine.

Spray the late apples with arsenate of lead to help check the codlin moth. One spraying in the early season will not hold the fruit clean. Don’t let the strawberry plants suffer from drought. Keep the sprinkler going. You should be gathering ripe berries for some time yet. Even the stragglers are welcome. Most of the plants stop fruiting when they begin making runners. The first plant out from the parent is always worth keeping. See that it gets a chance to root. The firstborn always fruits the following season. Only when the variety is one of the incomplete sorts is there any trouble. Some of the plants open out flowers that will not set fruit unless they are fertilised by another complete variety. Many a man has wondered over the strange things which now and

again happen among the strawberries. The way to overcome the non-fruiting is to root out every third row and replant with a variety that is known to be of the right kind. Never be afraid to run a few rows of cabbage, or swede turnips in among your young fruit trees. Manuring the ground for the vegetables will help the trees; watering, even, gives the trees a lift along. Where corn or pumpkins are being grown in the home orchard, it will be necessary to let the vines and the cornstalks have all the water you can spare for them. To secure a better setting of grains on the cobs take and shake the tassel, which is the flower of the corn plant over the silk which grows out of the point of the young cob when the right time arrives for the fertilisation of the seed grains. Anyone who will do that will always increase the number of their corn cobs. Fertilisation is everything.