Winter Meetimr. 207 



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dred to six hundred acres, that I have had under control, it is on 

 prairie land, but it has been well worked and it has held up well. 

 Of course on land where it is dry and has not been worked, many of 

 the trees if not dead are almost dead. 



What I am looking to now is the future. There are orchards, ap- 

 parently in good shape, if the man don't get right down to work and 

 give them attention another year, I think they will see the affects of 

 it, as they saw the affects of the freeze of 1899, which we are seeing 

 every day. There was a piece of low ground which in 1899 the freeze 

 affected, yet we overcame it considerably, and that orchard I turnerl 

 back to the man. He had quit working it and this year almost all 

 of it died, whereas if it had been a fair season, I believe it would 

 have been what we call a fairly good orchard, if he had not neglected 

 it. 



My idea of cultivating an orchard Avould be, first, plow it and 

 plow it tolerably deep up to withn three or four feet of the trees, and 

 then go as deep as you can wthiout breaking too many roots ; that 

 would depend, of course, on the age of the orchard and how you had 

 worked and cultivated it before. We find that where it has been 

 worked too deep after the roots came to the top, it has been detri- 

 mental — it checks the tree. 



One of these orchards that we turned over, the man hired a man 

 from the vicinity, who came in there and pruned a fifty-acre orchard ; 

 I believe it was in June. It cost him somewhere near one hundred 

 dollars. Well, he says to me, what do you think of it. I says, no 

 use to answer you what I think of it, for I never did it while I had 

 it in my possession. So he went right on and it stunted and checked 

 ii right there. 



Now when the drouth came along, if I had been going to prune, 

 I would have pruned a little and worked more. The trouble with my- 

 self, and I expect with lots of others, I guess, is this : We undertake 

 too much. It has been a draw back to my success. I have undertaken 

 too much. I would rather have a fifty-acre or a hundred acres well 

 worked, than have five hundred acres half-worked, and neglect the 

 other; and if we will only get down to work, and work hard and give 

 close attention to what we have, and not take too much, I believe we 

 are sure of success. 



To show you what the drouth did. There is not one in a hundred 

 of our trees that are worth setting out. We set out an orchard of 

 1900 peach trees, of which 1,700 are dead. In an orchard of 1,300 

 aj^ple trees there are not over fifty that lived. Another orchard of 

 1,500 about 1,200 died. The point is doing anything in time. Some 



