36 £ STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



SEASON FOR PRUNING. 



A western fruit grower says that he cut off a limb an inch in diameter from 

 an apple tree in each month of the year. At the end of five years, when they 

 were all healed over, they were opened, and those found to have decayed the 

 least were those cut in February and March, or just before the swelling of the 

 buds, while those cut in June and July, or during the growing season, had 

 decayed the most ; by this it would appear that the old way of pruning in early 

 spring, before the sap begins to flow, was the best. 



PRUNING FOR WOOD AND FRUIT. 



Mr. William Saunders of Washington, 1). C, thinks the rule to prune in 

 summer for fruit, and in winter for wood, needs a good deal of qualifying. He 

 admits that the methods employed to produce fruitfulness in a tree, by reducing 

 the vigor of the tree by shortening in, dwarfing, root-pruning, tying down 

 branches, will all tend in the direction of fruitfulness, but it is to the practical 

 application of the rule for summer pruning that he criticises. He says: "If 

 the shoots of a growing apple tree are shortened in one-third, say towards the 

 close of June, the remaining buds instead of developing into fruit buds, will in 

 ordinary seasons, start out new growths of wood. If this pruning is delayed 

 until August, and is followed by dry weather, the probabilities are in favor of 

 the formation of fruit spurs, but if the fall should prove wet and warm, the 

 result will be the same as in the June pruning, and the new shoots will go into 

 winter in the worst possible shape, a green succulent growth with no ripeness. 

 The process then, to say the least, is somewhat dangerous in application. But 

 if the cause of barrenness be impaired vitality instead of over luxuriance, sum- 

 mer pruning would speedily destroy the tree." 



As to pruning in winter for wood, he doubts if this method will produce in 

 the aggregate any more growth, but by confining the growth to fewer buds, 

 greater length is secured, and there is no doubt but winter pruning will by this 

 means impart a vigor to weak trees to be secured in no other way. He gives a 

 more precise maxim as follows : "Summer pruning tends to weaken the growth 

 of a plant, while winter pruning tends to increased vigor in the branches, and 

 all pruning is of more or less injury to the vitality of plants." 



FERTILIZERS. 



VALUE OF SWAMP MUCK. 



Muck is generally praised without "ifs" or " buts," and the following view 

 by Col. F. D. Curtis may give a hint that will set somebody to thinking: 



The mistake about muck is that everything found in wet places is called 

 muck. Black sand or dirt is carted out as muck, but is worthless, except to 



