Page:A book of the west; being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall.djvu/123

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As the season doth advance, Your apples for to gather, I bid you catch the chance To pick them in fine weather. O the jovial days, &c.

"When to a pummy ground, You squeeze out all the juice, sir, Then fill a cask well bound, And set it by for use, sir. O bid the cider flow In ploughing and in sowing, The healthiest drink I know In reaping and in mowing. O the jovial days, &c."

This fresh and quaint old song was taken down from an ancient sexton of over eighty near Tiverton.

The young apple trees have a deadly enemy in the rabbit, which loves their sweet bark, and in a night will ruin half a nursery, peeling it off and devouring it all round. Young cattle will break over a hedge and do terrible mischief to an orchard of hopeful trees that promise to bear in another year or two. The bark cannot endure bruising and breaking—injury to it produces that terrible scourge the canker. Canker is also caused by the tap-root running down into cold and sour soil; and it is very customary, where this is likely, to place a slate or a tile immediately under the tree, so as to force the roots to spread laterally. Apple trees hate standing water, and like to be on a slope, whence the moisture rapidly drains away. As the song says, the orchard apples when ripe glow "gold and red," and the yellow and red apples make the best cider.