Abstract
THE third report on the Woburn Experimental Fruit Farm, recently issued by the Duke of Bedford and Mr. Spencer Pickering, F.R.S., is devoted to a discussion of the effects of grass on apple trees. In previous reports it was shown that grasses prove most injurious to young apple trees, and the experiments described here were designed to throw light on the causes of injury. Up to the present time the cause, or causes, have not been discovered, but the experimenters have made considerable progress, for they have shown that their first suspicions were unfounded. Grasses might reasonably be expected to injure young fruit trees by interfering with their air, or water, or food supply, but the careful experiments recorded in the report indicate that interference with air, water, and food has little or nothing to do with the question, and that the injury “must, in all probability, be attributed to the action of some product, direct or indirect, of grass growth which exercises an actively poisonous effect on the roots of the tree.” This conclusion is based partly on the negative evidence of the experiments, in which the supplies of food, air, and water were controlled, and partly on the appearance of the trees grown in grass. These trees were always very sharply marked off from the others by peculiar tints of leaf and fruit, quite unlike those due to starvation, and produced obviously by some unhealthy condition of soil. The effects of grass on apple trees have been studied only on the shallow clay soil of the Woburn Fruit Farm and on a clay soil at Harpenden, and it is possible, as the experimenters are careful to point out, that on a richer soil, and in a different climate, grass might not prove injurious, but the Woburn experiments clearly indicate that horticulturists should avoid planting apples in grass, unless there is local evidence that grass does not injure the young trees.
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Agricultural Notes . Nature 69, 162–163 (1903). https://doi.org/10.1038/069162b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/069162b0