48 NEBRASKA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



fortable homes, or at least with the possibility of producing such homes. 

 From a vast, treeless prairie have sprung farms and gardens and orch- 

 ards, beautifying the landscape and yielding their bounteous harvests to 

 the skill of the intelligent farmer. That there are so many such homes 

 is proof of the natural resources of the country. That there are so few 

 is proof of our neglect of these refining influences, and of our poverty 

 of ideals in our endless struggle for material success. 



It is true that pioneer conditions may often have prevented giving at- 

 tention to the growing of fruits and trees and that failures have resulted 

 from a lack of education or experience in these lines, but the great and 

 fundamental difficulty seems to be that as a class we have no intelligent 

 conception of what may be accomplished and no well-grounded knowledge 

 of the principles which will bring success. Trees have been planted and 

 possibly cultivated for a year or two aud then left to shift for themselves, 

 fighting grass and drought on the one hand and cattle and horses and 

 hogs on the other. Between these and insect pests the tree claims planted 

 by the early settlers and many of the groves set more recently have been 

 short-lived. , 



But we have reached an era of better things. The leaders in pioneer 

 horticulture represented in this Society have developed varieties hardy 

 in the different regions of the state. Thoroufh cultivation has been 

 advocated in all the drier regions, and pioneer planting has 'been done 

 in most regions which can be used as a guide to future planting. This 

 Society, through persistent labor, has acquired the knowledge which will 

 successfully extend the fruit-growing belt until great areas of the state 

 to the west and northwest now practically without fruit may have an 

 abundance for their home use. 



In this problem of extending the tree growing and fruit growing area, 

 the horticulturist has been a pioneer in teaching the benefits of tillage 

 to increase the water-holding power of the soil. Probably no single line 

 of agricultural education at our University is of so great benefit to all 

 the people as the study of the relation of tillage to plan growth. When 

 these principles are understood, trees and fruits may be grown with 

 safety where it would be quite impossible without it. Young orchards 

 growing at the experiment station at North Platte have shown no effect 

 of injury by drought under good cultivation, and many young orchards in 

 the region seem to have an abundance of moisture under proper tillage, 

 yt this is a region where to abandon tillage would probably result in 

 di??strous drought. The writer has seen cottonwood trees at Sidney, Ne- 

 braska, part of which were under thorough tillage and others under ir- 

 rigation without tillage. The growth and condition of the trees was all 

 in favor of the tillage. I have also seen on a dry table-land north of Sid- 

 1 .V. black and honey locust, green ash and box elder, making splendid 

 growth under clean cultivation and giving promise of making an effective 

 windbreak within five years of planting if the clean cultivation is con- 

 tinued. The growth of forest trees at the experiment station at North 



