S4: Mississippi Valley Horticultural Society. 



half of the years, where these crops would bring greater profits than any- 

 other line of horticultural production, and yet the peach orchards of this re- 

 gion are declining in amount year by year, for the simple and only reason 

 that their owners don't like to catch "bugs." Peaches are worth $4 or $5 a 

 bushel in the market, and careful accounts of the labor of thorough curculio 

 protection show that it costs but about seven cents a bushel for the crop saved 

 and marketed; and yet the majority of our j^each orchard owners fold their 

 arms in dignity and say that if they "can't grow peaches without killing bugs 

 they won't have j^eaches" — and they don't. True, they send to market some 

 small per cent, of a crop of half ripened, gummy, wormj^, rotting peaches, 

 and receive back more curses than dollars therefor. But such a thing as a 

 full sized crop of sound, red faced, melting, delicious, wealth-bringing, beauT 

 tiful jDcaches, these men have never beheld ; and they will not, luitil some- 

 body can persuade them of a fair margin of profit in the transaction of bug 

 killing on the basis of the figures I have given. It is a painful fact that peach 

 growing throughout most of this favored region is but a sad mockery of a 

 noble and lucrative avocation. 



The apple moth and the curculio are the two most destructive enemies that 

 infest the orchard. They are found everywhere in this valley where fruit 

 trees are grown. They seem to have been sent us from Providence to test 

 the worthiness of men to have fruit. They are both perfectly, or sufficiently, 

 under the control of good orchard management; and yet they are allowed 

 to lay waste the rich inheritance around us, and to threaten the extinction of 

 the most beautiful products of the land. Nothing will arouse the majority of 

 our orchardists from their slothful attitude to these evils but the brilliant and 

 profitable success of the few among tliem who can see this question in its 

 proper light, and who have the energy to combat these difficulties single 

 handed and alone. 



There are no more destructive agencies in the orchard than the two insects 

 I have alluded to; but there are other hindrances to success far more diffi- 

 cult to deal with. The many forms of parasitic fungi which attack our trees, 

 vines, plants and fruits, are the most serious of these. When we enter the 

 wide realm of the blights, the rusts, the mildews and the rots, we are in a 

 strange and obscure world whose laws and causes and effects few of us 

 well understand, but whose varied power over our property we are made 

 painfully aware of. That stealthy fungus described by Prof. Burrill, in our 

 last volume, under the title of 



"AN ORCHARD SCOURGE," 



Is quietly establishing itself in the (orchards over great areas of country. And, 

 wherever it gains a foothold, it seems, like original sin, to have "come to 

 stay." I can not but believe that the researches of our scientific investiga- 

 tors will open to us some deliverance from this vegetable pestilence. If not, 

 the outlook for apple and pear growing is gloomy enough for many sections. 

 Certain it is, that with grape rots and mildews so infesting the vineyards of 



