I’m reading an old newspaper, in which is some advice on how to irrigate prune orchards with dynamite:
DYNAMITE DOUBLED PRUNE CROP.
How a prune crop jumped from 3000 pounds to over 8000 pounds in the dry year of 1913 is told by Geo. N. Tyler of Santa Clara county, who did the dynamiting which resulted in not over 5 per cent dropping, as compared with 30 or 40 per cent in neighboring orchards. Dynamiting broke up the hardpan, accepted and saved what rain fell during the winter of 1912-13, pruned the roots and started new ones which actively fed the doubled crop in 1913. The orchard was dynamited in the fall. Trees were 16 feet apart and shots were placed in the center between each four of them. The mistake was made at first, of boring through the hardpan and exploding the shot under it. .A pothole was thus made, but the hardpan, 12 to 24 inches thick and 18 to 36 inches under the surface, was not much affected. The successful system breaks up the hardpan, throws up the ground for ten feet around the shot, and cracks it 16 feet away, as shown where some of it had been uncovered that far from a shot. The successful way was to bore a test hole to see how far it was through hardpan, then bore another hole nearby but only two-thirds through it. A 1 ¼- inch cartridge of 25 per cent dynamite was used in each hole.
And an advertisement from Hercules Powder:
“Post Holds are a Cinch” “A half a mile of post holes is no joke when you dig’em by hand but with the help of dynamite it’s a different story. Blasting the holes is a cinch and it saves more than half the work on a job like this. We’ve saved hundreds of dollars and days of back-breaking work this year by using HERCULES DYNAMITE You’ll never know all the ways in which explosives can help you in farm and orchard work until you’ve read ‘Progressive Cultivation’. This book tells all about the uses of dynamite for tree planting, draining, clearing land, digging post holes and cellars, road building grading and many other purposes. This 68 page illustrated book will be sent free to any farmer or orchardist who signs the attached coupon and mails it to the Hercules Powder Co.” Send today for “Progressive Cultivation” — you need it in your business. HERCULES POWDER CO. 1025 Chronicle Building San Francisco California Hercules Powder Company,1025 Chronicle Building, San Francisco, Ca
You can see the newspaper here: http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=PRP19191213.2.32.2&e=——-en–20–1–txt-txIN——–1