Il6 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



rate. My son said so much against this operation, however, 

 that I finally thought I would see if I could save them, but I 

 hadn't much faith in the work. 



My father was a man who, like three-quarters or more of 

 our New England farmers, did not believe in pruning his trees. 

 The only thing that he would ever allow the hired man to do, 

 or would allow me to do when I was a young man at home, in 

 regard to pruning trees, was to cut out the dead w-ood and some 

 of the suckers or water sprouts. So you can see how those 

 trees had been growing for years and in what condition they 

 were. And in addition to that, half or two-thirds of them were 

 badly infested with the scale. When I made up my mind to 

 see what I could do with the trees the first winter, the winter 

 of 1906-7, I started in pruning them what I could. With the 

 condition the trees were in, I only got over a few trees during 

 that winter, with w^hat other w^ork I had to attend to. 



There were then about 700 trees on the place. About the 

 first of ^larch I ordered a barrel of Scalecide. I thought I 

 w^ould try to spray the worst of those trees for the San Jose 

 scale. I took a barrel pump and my man and myself went over 

 a few of the w'orst trees and disposed of that barrel of Scale- 

 cide. Then my son stepped in again and said: "Why don't 

 you spray for the codling moth and see if you can raise some 

 good fruit?" Well, I considered that a while and finally I 

 ordered two 100 lb. kegs of Bowker's Pyrox manufactured by 

 the Bowker Insecticide Company of Boston, and my hired man 

 and myself went to work on one of my orchards to spray the 



trees. 



To explain the condition of things, I will have to explain the 

 position of the orchard on that farm. There are two orchards ; 

 one at the south end of the farm, which we call the south or- 

 chard, contains something over 300 trees; 125 of these are 

 trees that are twenty-one and twenty-two years old, which my 

 father set out. He kept that ground cultivated for two or three 

 years and then it went into grass and has remained so ever since. 

 In the remainder of the orchard the trees are at least sixty and 

 I don't know^ but more than seventy years old. The north 

 orchard contains a little more than 200 trees and they are all 

 old trees, sixty or more years old. In a part of that orchard the 

 trees are only about twenty-five feet apart and they run up high. 



