540 Report of the Department of Horticulture of the 



Color. — In America, fashion calls for red apples. The apples 

 grown in sod in this experiment, as is the case in all sodded orchards 

 in New York, comply with the fashion and are brilliantly colored, 

 while those grown under tillage are of sombre hues. This is the 

 single instance in which sod-mulched fruit surpasses tilled fruit. 

 But as we have pointed out in the two previous bulletins from this 

 Station having to do with apples under these two methods of treat- 

 ment, abnormally bright color indicates constitutional disease or 

 decrepitude. The coloring matter in the skins of apples is modified 

 chlorophyll and as the chlorophyll of leaves becomes brilliantly 

 colored in autumn tints, preceding maturity and decay, so the 

 bright red of the sod-grown apple may be regarded as premature 

 ripening preliminary to decay; for the sodded apples, as we shall see 

 in the next division of our subject, mature and pass out of season 

 more quickly than the tilled apples. 



The fact that sod-grown apples are always the most highly colored 

 fruits, disproves the current opinion that the color of apples is 

 almost wholly a matter of climate. The statement is found every- 

 where in pomological literature that sunlight produces brilliant 

 colors in fruit — that, like the complexion of Shakespeare's dusky 

 Moor, the red color of apples " is but the burnished rays of the 

 burning sun." Rather, we shall find, as in this experiment, that 

 high color is more a matter of maturity than of climate, maturity, 

 of course, often, but not always, being dependent on climate. 



Maturity and keeping-quality of apples. — In all of the ten years of 

 this experiment the sod-mulched fruit has ripened materially earlier 

 and has been picked from one to three weeks sooner than that under 

 tillage, depending upon the weather. Thus, if the season was wet 

 and cool the difference in ripening time was but a few days but if 

 dry and warm it ranged from one to three weeks. This is an intensi- 

 fication of the deleterious action of the sod and affects the product 

 in three ways; it causes smaller fruit, a shorter season of usefulness in 

 common storage, and poorer quality. 



The difference in keeping quality was usually more marked in 

 common storage than that of time of maturity. In cold storage, 

 tests carried on by the United States Department of Agriculture 

 during the first five years, as reported in Bulletin No. 314 l from this 



1 N. Y. Sta. Bui. 314: pp. 99-101. 1909. 



