Summer-fallow Before Fruit Planting
Categories: Soils, Fertilizers and IrrigationI recently bought a ranch at Sheridan, Placer county, and was intending
to put 10 acres to peaches and 50 acres to wheat or barley, but the
residents tell me that the land must be summer-fallowed before I can do
anything. The soil is a red loam and has not been plowed for six years.
Your local advisers are probably right as to the necessity for
summer-fallowing in order to conserve moisture from a previous year's
rainfall and to get the land otherwise into good condition. There might
be such a generous rainfall that an excellent crop might come without
summer-fallowing, and the results will depend upon the rainfall. If it
should be small in amount, you might not recover your seed. By the same
sign you might not get much growth on your fruit trees, but you could
help them by constant cultivation and by using the water-wagon if the
season should be very dry. Therefore, you are likely to do better with
trees than with grain without summer-fallowing, although even for trees
it is a decided advantage to have more moisture stored in the subsoil
and the surface soil pulverized by more tillage.
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