VALLEY HOKTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 395 



will do better, but, taking the country as a whole, I believe I am not 

 far from the facts; yet there will ])e enough for table use and seed. 

 The extreme drouth dwarfed all of the earlier vegetables, spoiling 

 some totally and rendering others scarcely eatable at all. Early cab- 

 bages were small; late cabbages are very scarce throughout the 

 country. There is, perhaps, not one hundred bushels of turnips in 

 this county. I had the best crop of sweet potatoes in quantity and 

 quality I have ever raised; dry weather suited them. And now I 

 must tell you something about the small fruits. The strawberry 

 crop was seriously injured by the drouth, cutting off my own crop 

 fully one-third; and this is not all. The continued drouth, con- 

 nected with the industry of the moles, killed a great many of my 

 vines, necessarily destroying the prospect of another year. Cherries 

 were a large crop, but one-half of the trees that bore the crop will 

 never bear another. You will see upon examination that there is 

 but little preparation made for fruit another year. Indeed, a large 

 number of the older trees have not added a particle of new growth. 

 Raspberries and blackberries, of course, could not be much of a crop 

 with so much dry weather. A splendid grape yield all over America. 

 I have never raised, or known of being produced, a finer quality of Con- 

 cord grapes, or quantity. Taken as a whole, the year 1886 will be 

 memorable as a year of universal enough. 



Mr. Sizer — I have some eighteen or twenty Concord vines about 

 twenty years old, and never laid down but twice in all that time. 

 This year they bore a heavy crop of very fine and sweet grapes. 



The President said grapes had done remarkably well this year, 

 whether pruned or not, cultivated or neglected; in fact my own vines 

 that were neglected did the best, but I would not recommend neg- 

 lect of the vineyard in consequence. The quality of grapes has been 

 very fine, in consequence, probably, of our very dry summer. In 

 California, in some portions of the San Joaquin valley, where the 

 water level was forty or more feet below the surface, there was no 

 rot or mildew; but where the water level was only a foot or two be- 

 low the surface they had plenty of both rot and mildew. This 

 seems to show that dry feet is good for the grape vine. 



Mr. Hammond said there were three grape vines planted some 

 fifteen years ago. They were permitted to take care of themselves 

 for some ten years, and they bore no fruit. Since then they have 

 been regularly pruned and laid down every autumn, and have borne 

 abundant crops ever since. 



