52 TEANSACTIONS OP THE ILLINOIS 



have never redeemed that promise. Unless early picking improves, 

 they are too poor in quality. 



Mr. Webster — Keifer, and in fact many others of our pears 

 are much improved by picking a week before ripe — pick as soon as 

 they will part readily from the stem. I speak from experience. 



FAITH IN PROFITABLE APPLE-GROWING IN THE AVEST. 

 BY CHAS. PATTERSOX, KIRKSVILLE, MO. 



It seems that your wide-awake officers have happened to hear of 

 my planting 12,000 apple trees last spring, on a solid eighty acres of 

 ground, and therefore kindly invited me to give you a paper on this 

 subject. The invitation might also be construed as a demand to 

 give a reason for the faith that is in me, or to show, if I can, that I 

 am not a visionary enthusiast, or losing my mental equilibrium. Of 

 course I have no serious apprehensions that you will fail to show 

 and feel all the respect that is due to any thing I may say, but if 

 your orchards do not speak for you and against me, louder than 

 words, I will give you credit for doing far better than my neighbors 

 at home, with scarcely any exceptions. I have had to take most of 

 my lessons from others by contraries — by warnings how not to do 

 it — and I would go one hundred miles, afoot if necessary, to see an 

 orchard twenty or fifteen years old, that I would call even approxi- 

 mately well taken care of. 



Some ten or twelve years ago, I went to a neighbor's orchard to 

 get some cions that I could not well procure elsewhere. There were 

 six trees about fifteen years old, but i could not find a single cion of 

 last year's growth, even two inches long. In fact they seemed to 

 have made scarcely any growth at all, and as they had never been 

 pruned, as far as could then be judged, there was not even a water- 

 sprout. The ground was closely set in grass, which had been mowed 

 or pastured for years, as had seemed easiest or most remunerative. 

 That orchard, about ten acres, had been written up and talked about 

 as proving, the excellent wisdom of planting orchards for profit in 

 our county. It was scarcely known to have failed of a remunerative 

 crop, and had actually paid for itself exceedingly well. But I quietly 

 made up my mind that it could not continue to do so many years, 

 and sure enough it has never bore a single good crop since. I had 

 not observed this want of growth in orchards before as I have since. 

 Now I can distinguish it from the car window, at a distance of sev- 

 eral hundred feet, summer or winter. And I very seldom see an 

 orchard of the same age that is in much better condition. Our soil 

 makes a peculiar, close sod, and finer hay than Western Missouri, or 

 Illinois, as far as I have seen, and therefore our trees will show this 

 condition several years sooner, but it is only a question of time in 



