No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 791 



FKUNING, FERTILIZING AND THINNING. 



By Du. J.H. FL'NK, Boyertown, Pa. 



These three are each a sermon in themselves, and happy is the 

 fruit raiser who intelligently performs the task. He will have the 

 most luscious fruit in abundance and have the market at his own 

 door and pleasure and riches will be his boon companions. Never 

 were the Scriptures better illustrated than by quoting, ''To him that 

 hath shall be given and to him that hath not shall be taken, even that 

 which he hath/' for the faithful horticulturist, who attends care- 

 fully to the minor details and looks well after his trees, will have a 

 constant increase in quantity and quality and good returns for his 

 product. While the careless, indifferent, good-enough-sort of a 

 being (it would be a slur on good language to call him a horticul- 

 turist) who neglects his trees, thinking that nature will take care 

 of him, he also gets his reward in poor, insipid, ill-colored, knotty, 

 scabby fruit in great numbers, but small in quantity, and that lit- 

 tle not marketable, and his trees soon become forlorn, sickly look- 

 ing objects with their trunks tunneled by borers, their foliage eaten 

 by the tent caterpillar, and the little life that remains is sucked out 

 by the San Jos6 Scale and their dead trunks stand as monuments of 

 a lost hope. 



We have an instance similar to the above in my own neighborhood. 

 A man of fair intelligence but with an inordinary bump of conceit, 

 one who knows it all, several years back planted several hundred 

 peach trees, some plum and other trees in a slipshod manner and gave 

 them the same kind of attention. Many soon died of yellows and 

 were left standing as a source of contagion. For a couple of fa- 

 vorable years he received fair crops. 



About three years back he came to my place bringing some 

 peaches well covered with San Jos^ Scale. I advised him to spray 

 and try to get rid of them. The other day the same man came riding 

 in to where I was mounting a gasoline engine on a wagon to rig up 

 a power-spraying outfit. After saluting, he said he thought he 

 would come and tell me that he had just heard that kerosene emul- 

 sion was good for San Jos^ Scale. I told him that had been tried 

 for several years, but that it had not given satisfaction; that the 

 lime, salt and sulphur had superseded it and with very good results. 



