Occasionally the peach itself is planted as an inter-crop in apple-orchards. The custom has little to recommend it and is not as common now as it was a few years ago. The objection to the peach as a catch-crop in the apple-orchard is that serious complications arise in orchard-operations, the two fruits often requiring quite different treatment in their care and, in spraying the apple, the peach is almost certain to be more or less injured. In the matter of cultivation, peach-growers are not in the fog that envelopes and befuddles apple-growers in New York. The peach so luxuriates under thorough cultivation and, on the other hand, the jaundiced leaves and hectic flush of the fruit speak so plainly of evil days when the trees are in sod or unbroken ground that cultivation is universal. Cultivation, as practiced by the best growers, consists of plowing the land in the spring and then frequently stirring the soil until late July or early August. The tools are as diverse as the kinds of soil. Whatever the details, the surface must be kept level, covered with a dust-mulch and free from weeds. In soils that are light, therefore hungry and thirsty, cultivation in the best orchards is almost continuous. To do full duty in such a soil many men cultivate weekly. Disking is sometimes substituted for plowing but this is usually poor policy for the plow buries the mummied peaches that drop in every orchard to scatter countless myriads of spores of brown-rot and so perpetuate this plague of the peach-grower. Winter retreats so sullenly in New York that it is sometimes difficult to find time and weather for early spring plowing so that increasing numbers of peach-growers are plowing their orchards in the fall.