GROWING PRUNES IN THE WILLAMETTE VALLEY. 



By A. C. Goodrich, Commissioner of the State Board of Horticulture 



for the First District. 



In discussing the prune in the Willamette Valley there is only one 

 variety, the Italian, to be taken into consideration. In the earlier 

 days of prune-planting the different varieties were all tried, and to that 

 fact may be attributed many of the earlier failures. In the first plant- 

 ings there were perhaps quite as many of the Petite or French prunes 

 planted as of the Italian variety and as it later developed that this 

 variety was not at all suited to our conditions, however well it might 

 be to those of our neighbor State of California, half our first orchards 

 were from the very beginning doomed to be failures. Then, when we 

 consider the fact that we had no data on which to base correct judgment 

 as to what soil would be best for them, at what elevation they should be 

 planted, how far apart, how they should be pruned or cultivated, how 

 cured or how marketed, the really surprising fact is that all are now 

 agreed as to the one variety to grow, most are agreed on all the other 

 essential facts, including that hardest one of all, marketing. 



In spite of all these adverse conditions and the fact that the apple 

 grows in the Willamette Valley with the same abandon that weeds grow 

 in a well fertilized garden, the prune, in only about a quarter of a 

 Century, has reached first place as a market fruit and bids fair to main- 

 tain its position, in spite of the fact that for some years the major por- 

 tion of the tracts cut up by real estate dealers into small parcels and 

 sold to non-residents have been planted to other fruits. 



While the planting of prunes has of late years not been ?o general 

 as the planting of walnuts and apples, they have, in the main, been 

 planted by men who know what they are doing and how to do it, or by 

 their neighbors who learn how, largely by profiting by the experience 

 of those already in the business. Because of these conditions and the 

 close personal attention they are likely to receive there will probably be 

 a much larger proportion of the prune-plantings reach profitable 

 maturity than there is likely to be of any of the other fruits or of nuts. 



At first the prune trees were planted much too close together; one 

 orchard I have seen being only eight feet apart, though most of them 

 were planted 16 to 18 feet. The net result of this was that in a com- 

 paratively short time the ground was füll of prune roots — in fact long 

 before the trees came into profitable bearing, and the plant food avail- 

 able in the soil was so far exhausted that the trees only bore alternate 

 years, or the fruit was so small as to be not only largely unprofitable 

 to the grower, but a menace to the market of the future, for the Italian 

 prune, like the Hood River and the Rogue River apple depends for its 

 most profitable market on the high quality of the Output. The distance 

 between the trees has been gradually widened until now most orchards 

 are set twenty-four feet or more apart, and the fact that in digging 

 a ditch last winter eighteen feet from a seven-year-old prune tree I 

 found a root as large as a lead pencil, leads me to believe that in the 

 near future we are likely to be setting them thirty or more feet apart. 



