68 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



petas. When I gather my apples, I pick up the windfalls and 

 put them into the barn and feed them out to the cows a few every 

 day. Clean the ground all off. If you will destroy the wind- 

 falls you are going to get rid of them. Another thing, if you 

 will keep your "harrar" going and make your trees grow thrifty, 

 the caterpillars and insects are not going to trouble it ; if they find 

 a tree half dead they will go into that and kill it. 



Our farmers don't know what a mine of wealth, what a possi- 

 bility there is for the Maine apple. Here we are right upon the 

 Atlantic coast, here is an export demand for Maine apples, and 

 if we only raise good fruit we will have a market for them. 

 When apples were very low I have sold Spies for five and six 

 dollars a barrel. Last year I sold ioo barrels of Spies for $4.50 

 a barrel, along in the middle of March. Well, I didn't expect 

 to sell them so soon ; I was kind of raising the price, calculated 

 to get more, but a fellow took me up and I let them go. I kept 

 a barrel of those apples to eat just as I brought them from the 

 orchard. I pick the apples carefully in the orchard, I do them 

 up in the orchard — not very hard but so they won't jar any, put 

 them into the cellar and let them lay there until I take them out 

 and pick them over when they are sold. I left one of those bar- 

 rels in the cellar last spring that laid just as I had picked it in 

 the orchard ; I opened it along about the middle of April or the 

 first of April and kept eating out of it. The last of them we ate 

 the middle of June and the next meal we had strawberries on the 

 home table ; we had strawberries two or three weeks until haying 

 time and then we had raspberries, and so on. I found just five 

 rotten apples in the bottom of that barrel ; that is just how that 

 barrel of apples kept. I take Northern Spies and put them into 

 my cellar and there is no shrink to them after cold weather 

 comes ; if there is any shrink it is in the fall. I calculate to keep 

 them cold. 



Most of our farmers believe they are not going to get any 

 apples and they don't get them — what they do get they call good 

 luck. They don't go into it in a scientific, common-sense way 

 to make a crop of apples, to make the thing permanent. You 

 take and cultivate an orchard and you are going to get a crop 

 everv year. The more manure you put on the better it is, but 

 without manure you will get apples if you use the "harrar" 

 enough, and you will not only get apples but you will make the 



