STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 73 



one can spray successfully till he has learned to recognize the 

 enemy and knows his habits. Spraying costs a lot of money 

 and it is apt to be wasted if you don't know why and when to 

 do it. 



Spraying, we will admit, is a mean job ; when the land is 

 soft and the engine or pump do not work right, and when the 

 well runs dry, the average man feels like quitting and going 

 out to plow, especially if he is in a hurry to get ahead of an 

 approaching storm or to get done before the blossoms close. 

 Those are some of the reasons why men have taken up dusting 

 as a substitute for some of the spraying operations. 



Dusting. 



Now, logically, there is no reason why the same materials 

 can not be blown on instead of sprayed on. The only difference 

 is, that air is used as a carrier instead of water. The chemical 

 nature of lime-sulphur, Bordeaux or lead is not changed by 

 the addition of water and the same materials blown on the 

 tree are held there by the fine hairs that cover the surface, and 

 are moistened and set fast by the moisture from the atmosphere. 

 In the experiments conducted by Cornell, and in all the dust- 

 ing I have done, the dust has proved to be as practical and 

 as efifective as the spray, when both were applied with equal 

 thoroughness. However, in the last two years I have had 

 uniformly better results from dusted blocks than from sprayed, 

 because it is easier to do a thorough job with the dust. You 

 can find the details of the dusting experiments in Cornell 

 Bulletin No. 369, and Extension Bulletin No. i, but the con- 

 clusions from the work are, that you can dust from four to 

 ten times as fast as you can spray, and the cost of materials, 

 though slightly greater for the dust, is not enough to outweigh 

 the saving in time and labor. 



Here are some of their figures, averaged and condensed for 

 the sake of brevity and clearness : 



For control of apple scab — 



Check plot untreated 40 % scabby apples 



sprayed 5.4% 



dusted 7.6% 



