598 Agricultural Experiment Station, Ithaca, N. Y. 



have been a novelty fifty years ago ; but the habit of imitation is so 

 strong that the apple planter patterns after the old orchards which 

 were grown under another and now a dechning system of agricul- 

 ture, and many of which are still standing on the old farms of New 

 York State. 



But there is still another reason for the neglect of the apple 

 orchard. Until fifty or sixty years ago the chief end of the apple 

 was the cider barrel. All the old writings enforce this idea. John 

 Taylor's famous " Arator," printed in Yirginia early in this century, 

 declares that " the apple will furnish some food for hogs, a luxury 

 for his family in winter, and a healthy liquor for himself and his 

 laborers all the year." He says that "good cider would be a 

 national saving of wealth, by expelling foreign liquor, and of life, 

 by expelling the use of ardent spirits." Coxe's " Cultivation of 

 Fruit Trees," in 1817, devotes nine chapters to cider and its pro- 

 ducts. The whole temper of the country was to make cider of the 

 apple. There is a record that one settlement near Boston, of about 

 forty families, made nearly three thousand barrels of cider in 1721 ; 

 and another New England town of 200 families made " near ten 

 thousand barrels." Now, any apple will make cider ; and the 

 presence of worms and apple-scab, and all the other accessories, may 

 be supposed to add to the merits of the product. It was not neces- 

 sary to care for orchards which were to grow cider, and the habit of 

 neglecting them has become so indelibly impressed upon the public 

 mind that all the teachings of the last generation have not been 

 able to erase it. The sod orchard is a survival. 



Now, I am not urging that the farmer shall put his apple or- 

 chard under clean tillage. I am simply trying to press home the 

 fact that apple trees must receive thought and care if the owner 

 is to expect much return from them. If tillage and timely effort 

 are good for corn, and peach trees, and blackberries, they ought 

 also to be good for apple trees. I asked a farmer not long ago 

 what his apple orchard is worth. " It is worth a good deal. A 

 crop of apples is a clean gift." He said moi'e than he knew, 

 and his thought is uppermost in many farmers' minds in this State. 

 If a thing is " a clean gift," no effort has been expended to secure 

 it. It is no merit of the average farmer if now and then he goes 

 into his orchard and finds a crop of apples there ; and he should not 

 complain if half the apples are scabby and all of them are wormy. 

 It is a generous soil which gives a crop of hay or grain year after 



