2^6 State Horticultural Society. 



yourself for spraying, but simply it was a conjunction of atmospheric con- 

 ditions and circumstances which brought that about. 



Now about the way in which these spores propagate. We have in 

 operation a good many cultures, as I call them, to find out what that 

 Bitter Rot fungus does with itself in the winter time, and we have tried 

 a particular experiment which I hope to report on next June. We built 

 a great glass platform in an orchard over some of the apples lying on the 

 ground, as in this photograph. I want to pass this around to show to 

 what extent the Bitter Rot hurt the apples. We put a glass platform 

 over those about three feet from the ground, and we have steriHzed the 

 bottom of that glass, and we are going to examine that every week during 

 the winter time, and we are going to investigate to see if any of these 

 spores fly up in the trees during the winter time. 



There can be no doubt that those spores do get up in the trees, and 

 the rains help them, too. I have a photograph which shows the infection 

 after it once gets upon the tree ; it starts from one affected apple. 



We have a record which was taken upon trees in Virginia, where the 

 rain drops, fell on a defective apple, and one could almost trace the direc- 

 tion of the spray of that rain three days later. It showed how those 

 spores had been scattered from that affected specimen over the tree. 



The practical orchardist will go around during the summer and 

 remove them. Of course, this is a tremendous piece of work, but as far as 

 the work goes it will pay to do it, even if you only take two apples off of 

 a tree. You are always walking through the orchard, and it is just as 

 easy to take off one or two apples here and there. 



I don't want to give any advice about spraying, for I don't feel that 

 I can say anything about it this year. We are going to begin and do 

 the spraying next spring, and we are going to use the same formula, and 

 in one or two orchards use a different formula, simply to demonstrate if 

 there is any difference in it. And we firmly believe that the spray that 

 we used, if it had not been for the circumstances that happened this 

 summer, would have been different. Of course, one thing Mr. Stinson 

 mentioned, that didn't make the experiment successful was on account 

 of the lack of moisture. The spores didn't spread, and in some orchards, 

 I think, there was not ten Bitter Rot apples. And in particular one 

 orchard in Illinois, where the owner came to me in July and said the 

 spray was going to be a howling succes, and his prophecy really was true, 

 for in the first place there was not any Bitter Rot, and in the second place 

 no apples in the orchard. But, nevertheless, the disease is so widely scat- 

 tered that it deserves the attention of everybody, and everybody must do 

 something. You don't want to wake up in the middle of the night and 

 say, I have not done this right, and I will have to do it over again, and 



