TWENTIETH ANNUAL MEETING. 73 



The r&sults were printed in Bulletin 63 and, altliough reprinted in a large 

 number of papers, the call for the bulletin has been very large. 



The results for this year with vegetables, fruits, and greenhouse, will 

 soon be issued, and any member of this society can have the bulletins of 

 the horticultural as well as of other departments of the station sent free to 

 his address, by furnishing it to the secretary of the society or to the 

 secretary of the station at Agricultural College postoffice, Michigan. 



The work of this department is for the benefit of the horticulturists of 

 the state, and their co-operation and suj)port has been of great assistance 

 to us. We are always glad to receive suggestions, and if any one has any 

 experiments in mind that would be likely to result in good to the general 

 public, he should not be backward in making them known. 



TEST YOUE FERTILIZERS. 



Mr. Morrill: Prof. Taft says good results were obtained from com- 

 mercial fertilizers on land of moderate fertility. I would like to know 

 what he used and if he used it early in the season. 



Prof. Taft : Sulphate of potash was used on early vegetables with good 

 results. In the houses, ground bone and bone-black did the same. Out- 

 side, both of these and sulphate and muriate of potash gave good results. 

 I do not like to advise the use of the so-called commercial fertilizers until 

 after a test upon a small scale upon several varieties of j)lants and com- 

 parison with unfertilized plats. 



STANDARD OR DWARF PEARS. 



Prof. Taft was asked which he would recommend for planting, standard 

 pears or dwarf, and replied: For the ordinary grower (ordinary methods 

 of culture) the standards — they will live longer and bear longer; yet, on 

 certain soils and with superior care, the dwarfs succeed best and are less 

 subject to blight. 



WHAT EXPERIMENTS ARE NEEDED? 



Following the reading of Prof. Taft's paper was the one given below, 

 by Mr. C. Engle of Paw Paw, on 



WHAT EXPERIMENTS DO FRUITGROWERS DESIRE? 



If the question had been put, " What experiments do fruitgrowers not 

 desire?" I think this paper would have been very short. Take the 

 orchard, vineyard, or berry-field, as they are now managed, and anyone 

 with never so small an amount of observation will readily see the wide 

 difference in their management in almost every part of the work, from the 

 time of setting until and after the fall maturity of the plants. One sets 

 his trees as much as six inches deeper than they grew in the nursery, and 

 I have seen it advocated to set even eight inches deeper. Another sets as 

 nearly as may be the same depth as they grew before taking up, and others 

 all the way between the two extremes. It seems to me that a series of 

 experiments made at our stations might permanently settle this question, 

 whether deep, medium, or shallow j)lanting produces the best results. 



The matter of pruning is another thing I would like to see experimented 



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