Winter Meeting. 235 



President JMurray : Not so much if they were properly healed up ; 

 if they were taken up before they were matured, nothing w^ould keep 

 them up. I think if they were properly healed down they would keep 

 all right. 



Mr. Marshall : My opinion is, that in this form of country they 

 appreciate that sort of care ; that they do well when under the ground and 

 away from our bleak winds, and stand it much better than they would 

 if they stood in the ground. I have had about 14 years' experience in 

 the work. 



Mr. Augustine : The peach tree north of this latitude can be 

 kept nowhere else successfully except in a cellar. You can't bury it 

 and keep it successfully, and you cannot leave it stand out and take 

 it up in the spring and make a success of it in four w'inters out of five. 

 I would not plant a peach tree that was left outside, north of this latitude 

 and transplanted in the spring, nor would I bury it in the fall and plant 

 it, because it is full of water. 



Mr. \Mlson of Iowa : I wish to state, my experience in regard to 

 storing trees in the winter depends upon how they are stored. If they 

 are kept in a warm cellar, I am inclined to thintc it does tend to reduce 

 the vitality. A few years ago I had a great deal of experience in fall 

 •digging and burying down apple trees, because I believed it preserved 

 the vitahty much better than for the trees to be dug, and I had a letter 

 from a gentleman in Montana, wdio was a former Iowa citizen, and he 

 wrote me that he wanted to place an order for forty-three thousand trees, 

 all apple trees two years old and wanted one condition to be in that 

 order, that they must be spring dug trees. I said very well, I will agree 

 that they will all be dug out of the ground in the spring ; that was my 

 reply and I recorded the letter. He 'made the order and I dug all of his 

 trees- out of the nursery the last week in October, and the first two weeks 

 in November, after they had fully matured, and bedded them down, 

 and in the spring I dug them all out as I had agreed to do in writing, 

 and shipped them to this party, and in six weeks after he had received 

 them, he wrote me that there never had been trees come to that country 

 that w^ere so strong and vigorous as those trees, and he said this more 

 than ever demonstrates the correctness of spring digging. Now the 

 point I wish to make is this : That the digging and bedding of the tree 

 in our climate further north preserves the vitality of the tree to a bet- 

 ter advantage, than if it stands out and goes through the freezing 

 and thawing processes of the winter, which as you all know tends to re- 

 duce the vitality of the tree. But it may not be so much so here as in 

 Iowa, and I am satisfied that if I was going to sell a man ten thousand 

 trees and- guarantee every one of them to grow, I would certainly reserve 



