The Old Time Farm Magazines: Homemade Salad Dressing, Fruit Trees and Homemade Recipes

Image Gallery Interested in making your own salad dressing or planting fruit trees? Read these old farm magazines for advice on both and more. ILLUSTRATION: MOTHER EARTH NEWS STAFF

Reprinted by permission from Successful Farming, copyright 1914, Meredith Corporation. All rights reserved. 

Invigorating Fruit Trees

Fruit trees in the orchard or anywhere about the home may be made to bear a much larger crop of fruit, and much finer specimens, if the trees are properly treated with fertilizers and given the attention they need to produce a healthy and vigorous growth.

May is the best time to apply the fertilizer, and it makes no difference how old the tree is, the application should be given, and the results will be plainly seen. Those who have made a careful study of this method of invigorating fruit trees declare there is a great difference seen when certain trees or rows of trees are not treated and stand in the same orchard on similar land to that on which the other trees stand. It is not a costly experiment, and will bring the fruit grower immense returns. One application will do good but it is best to keep it up each year for a period of at least three years, before a year is allowed to pass without fertilization, and then it should not be discontinued for more than a year at a time.

Trees large enough to bear should be given the following: five pounds of nitrate of soda, five pounds of acid phosphate, and two and a half pounds of muriate of potash, making twelve and one half pounds of the mixture to the tree.

A less quantity of the same mixture may be given a tree not old enough to bear fruit, judgment being used in the amount according to the size and vigor of the tree.

In applying this fertilizer the party should walk round the tree taking care to keep three or four feet farther from the trunk than the ends of the longest branches as they spread out over the soil.

Sow the mixture, throwing it in toward the tree, but allowing the most of the fertilizer to fall nearest the point where you pass round the outer circle. It is not essential that any fall on the ground nearer than three or four feet from the body of the tree.

The smaller roots will collect the strength and carry it to every portion of the tree. It is well to sprinkle the fertilizer on the surface just previous to a shower. The rain will dissolve it and it will immediately go into the earth.