Northwestern Horticultural Society. 261 



protected from intense heats. In the orchard of the farm con- 

 nected with the Iowa Agricultural College, buckwheat was grown 

 for three years and no blight appeared. Ashes and salt separately 

 or together, are cooling to the surface and have been known to 

 stop the blight. But the preventive most effective is the pruning 

 knife, or better still, the fingers on tender buds and sprouts. As 

 soon as the graft gets fairly to growing, rub or cat off all the crab 

 buds and sprouts of the limb a foot or so below the graft. It is 

 presumed that the grafter has already cut off all the limbs not 

 needed to make foliage the first season. The cutting off of so 

 many old limbs, as has been done by the grafter, stimulates the 

 vigorous growth of the sprouts from the remaining limbs, and 

 they must all be destroyed as fast as they appear. After a while 

 they will quit coming. The tree will learn that its crab character 

 is played out and after a while will second your efforts by making 

 no new buds on the crab wood. Perhaps once a week will be 

 often enough to examine the tree and remove the sprouts. If 

 after all the^e efforts, the blight begins to make its appearance on 

 grafts or limbs, as it may in seasons like the past one, when it 

 takes its most malignant form, use the pruning knife at once and 

 be sure you cut off the end of the blighted sprout or graft not 

 only below the external injury, but far enough down to make it 

 certain that all the affected parts, both internal and external, are 

 taken away. Here is where many people fail in pruning for the 

 blight. They do not cut low enough. The writer had about six 

 hundred grafts inserted in thirty-one crab trees last spring — all 

 of the trees having blighted in the limbs and some in the bodies 

 in previous years. Under the system of pruning herein described, 

 no blight appeared on the grafted trees until nearly all of the 

 same kind in his neighborhood had so far blighted as to look as 

 if a fire had run through them, and afterwards, when it com- 

 menced in a few of the grafts and crab limbs, it was very slight 

 and yielded at once to the knife. It will be seen from the fore- 

 going that it is not worth while to graft into the crabs except 

 with a view of making thorough work, and as fast as possible 

 without injury to the tree, grafting it all over. The blight cannot 

 be controlled and kept out on any other plan ; and while it con- 



